Brad and JM enjoying happy hour in the town with Dirk and Tom from Dancing Bear.  Carol and Mike on Tashi Delek.

Mike noticed several yachts had their navigation lights on, as though they were moving.  Then sirens started in the town.  Then a boat goes past us shouting ‘Tsunami’, get out! 

We put the VHF radio on and heard a torrent of Spanish followed by a brief announcement in English.  A Tsunami Alert was in place, all boats had to evacuate the harbour and head at least 20 miles south.  It is of course dark.

Brad and JM made it back to the boat pretty fast and it was all hands on deck to get things put away and the anchor up to join the numerous boats of all sizes heading out to see.  We had prepared dinner so ingredients were everywhere.  They were in a plastic box in the fridge in 30 seconds. 

As boats started to leave it was really heartening to see them looking out for each other and shouting warnings to the boats that didn’t seem to be moving.  Dancing Bear was ready to go in no time so we kept in touch by radio and agreed to stay close.  The motor boats got away fairly fast of course and the yachts had their engines on but couldn’t make the same sort of speed.  It was actually quite a sight and the adrenaline was certainly pumping as we tried to run through everything in our minds that needed to be checked. 

All the radio announcements were in Spanish so JM called his wife in Michigan and asked her to go on line and find out what the background was.  That is how we heard about the earthquake in Chile.

We have pieced together more information today and apparently a further announcement was made (in Spanish) about 1am saying it was OK to come back in, rapidly followed by a ‘No, stay where you are’.  Eventually at about 3am the all clear was given and the larger boats asked to come back in.  The small boats were given the OK around 4am.  This was all a complete mystery to us because the international language of the sea appeared not to be used in this emergency situation thereby excluding all the UK, US, Australian, New Zealand, French, Dutch, German and other boats from having the foggiest what was going on.

We are cautious by nature and so did not want to enter the harbour area in the dark so we just bobbed about on quite a choppy sea waiting for dawn.  We got 20 miles off as instructed but probably didn’t need to, the main thing is to get far enough off shore to reach deep water because the tidal wave picks up height and speed as the depth shallows.

Brad cooked eggs for breakfast, very welcome and Carol and Mike had a couple of hours of sleep to catch up and all was well.

What an experience – and not a bit of it was an April Fool.