23:8.27N 82:20.28W

 

Hi All

 

Thank you Penny, Genne, Connor, Robin and Mark for your emails.

 

Today, Monday 11th,  dawned sunny  with a prediction of 12 knots breeze from the west, and a 3 meter swell from the north, the remains of Irma.

We decided to leave our sheltered Bahai Honda and head for Havana 45 miles away. A few Cuban fisherman were in the shallows with nets and all were friendly with lots of wavying hello/goodbye.

 

Getting out of Bahia Honda was exciting, wending our way through the channel markers with major reefs on either side with a huge tanker wreck on our port side (left hand side). The incoming north swell provided quite a few major ups and great splash downs, and I was thankful again for the excellent  netting on Meshugga upfront – with 90% holes the water splashed straight through and fell away with no impact on Meshugga except providing quite a spectacular scene.

 

We did the basic cleaning up yesterday and got more much needed sleep.

We’ll see if we can pick up some labour in Havana, otherwise it’ll be a few days of cleanup duty for us to get Meshugga back into normal condition.

 

We arrived at the entrance to Marina Hemmingway, Sante Fe, Havana at 3pm to find that there were huge breaking waves in the channel – far too dangerous for us to enter, so we continued onto Port Havana which is the commercial port and generally off limits to yachts.

 

Officials came alongside soon after we entered Port Havana, and after some questioning they sped off asking us to hold station. They returned with a senior official who came aboard for more questioning and then agreed to allow us to anchor in the harbour overnight, cautioning us that we were to remain aboard and to not even launch our dingy. This was fine with us, and tomorrow, Tuesday we’ll return to Marina Hemmingway and hopefully the breaking surf has subsided and we can get in.

 

We’re not sure how long we will be here in Cuba. We’d like to take a quick look around, given that we’re coming back in December. Once we’ve got an update on what happened in the states wrt to Irma’s landfall and damages/flooding etc - we’ll decide where in Florida to go to to wait out the remainder of the Hurricane Season.

 

Kieran/Connor, T-Mobile does not work in Cuba, and their rates are huge at $2 per MB, so we’ll stay on the Tracphone for email downloads. Drop us a note if we need to chat and time to call, and we’ll Skype you.