After the night at anchor in Diamond Cay I spent the morning hours trying to decide what to do with the day ahead. The waves were still high, albeit with a long period, but sailing upwind to Marina Cay would still be a chore, I’d been to Great Harbour just a few days before and didn’t want to repeat myself and the sail there would just be a couple of minutes.
After breakfast I decided to use the cloudy conditions to see if I could get a couple of good photographs of the bubbly pool without the washed-out colors of bright Caribbean sunlight. This time I came prepared – I checked to make sure that there was a battery in the camera, took along a second lens and brought the tripod. While the light conditions were OK and the waves nice and high, the wind blew a fine spray all around that didn’t make for the crisp pictures I had hoped for. Nonetheless the tripod helped and I even made a couple of videos with the Nikon and will have to download some editing software so that I can prune and correct the videos before posting them.
I decided to head out before actually figuring out where I wanted to go. I weighed the anchor and put up a heavily reefed mainsail since I could see the white-tops on the waters outside the protected anchorage and then put the heavily reefed genoa up as well and decided I would go to Peter Island for the rest of the day and spend the night there at anchor. The winds were about 25 knots true and I made very good speed to the cut at Soper’s Hole and rolled up the genoa and motorsailed through that narrow passage between the islands since it was exactly into the wind and tacking through there is a lot of work. After the cut I once again rolled out a heavily reefed headsail and comfortably beat upwind in the Sir Francis Drake channel, comfortably doing 4-7 knots with the boat hardly heeled over while other boats with much more sail were fighting and had their toe rails in the water. While the catamarans weren’t heeled they did a lot of slamming into the choppy seas in the channel.
After a couple of tacks and having made a bit of headway, I 46 foot Moorings catamaran with a skipper aboard passed within 50 feet of me and I realized that this wasn’t correct and that I was making life too easy; so I let out a bit more genoa to between the 3rd and 2nd reef points and that brought my speed up to match his. Then came a tack and a long (and perhaps final) run to The Bight so I changed my mind about my destination and let out the full genoa. This made a big difference to both my heel angle and speed; but I wasn’t going to let a catamaran beat me on an upwind run. I still had far too little mainsail out, but that was going to be too much work to head up into wind and let out more sail; plus I was now faster than the cat and would soon catch up and pass her and that was all I really wanted to do. The old question-and-answer to “Q: When are 2 sailboats racing?” “A: When they are in sight of each other.” proved true.
After anchoring in what is now my accustomed spot in the Bight I puttered around the boat a bit and dinghied over to the Willie T’s for the sun downer drink and some dinner. The crowd was a mixed one and changed around sunset, but the staff as usual adjusted their music to the crowd and it proved a rather quiet evening. The burger was tasty and I made do with drinks out of a can (I prefer bottles, but glass isn’t a good idea on the Willie T where most of the guests, including myself, go barefoot on the steel decks.
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