Position 26:58.796N 77:41.708W
PASSEPARTOUT
Christopher & Nirit Slaney
Thu 8 Dec 2011 15:05
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LOCAL KNOWLEDGE!
Our original plan for crossing the gulf stream to
the Abacos had us leaving Port Everglades around sunset on Tuesday,
this would have brought us to the tricky passage inside Memory Rock at high
tide on Wednesday morning with plenty of daylight to pick our way through the
sand banks. The was an excellent plan put forward by Tom Dwyer, a local sailor
who knows these waters like the back of his hand and had generously volunteered
to pilot us through the first leg.
But Nirit was awake at 2 a.m. on Tuesday and checking
the weather forecast; a cold front was moving down from the north and would
bring with it high winds around midnight. If we didn't bring forward our
departure by twelve hours we would be spending the rest of the week in
Florida.
Another week in Florida was not such a bad idea. We
were having a great time as guests of Yaniv on his dock at Dania Beach. Alex,
Mirit and Smadar were going out of their way to show us around and Roni
had some unfinished business at the mall. Still, it was time to
go. Tom agreed as was on an early train down from Palm Beach. The first
past of the passage was uneventful in fine weather with a light breeze, too
light to risk sailing the first eighty miles and arriving at the shoals
just in time to get beaten up by the forecast northerlies. After an
abortive attempt to fly the spinnaker we settled down to motoring at seven
knots.
A couple of miles from our landfall at Memory
Rock the depth suddenly came up from 144 metres to 2.2 metres as
we overran an underwater cliff at the western edge of the Bahamian Bank.
I've never experienced anything like it. By the light of a full moon we
could see the ocean floor. For some time we have been listening to other
sailors complain that most charts of the Bahamas are wildly inaccurate, not
that the islands are marked in the wrong place but the depths are not to be
trusted. The worst offender is reckoned to the Navionics charts which we
use on board Passepartout. Nirit had bought a second set of 'Explorer' charts
which are considered to be based on better, more recent surveys, and
Tom brought along his own GPS device loaded with Garmin
charts.
Within minutes of arriving over the shallow waters
of the banks we learned that the Navionics charts are not reliable at all. Tom
had plotted a zig-zag route through the sand banks on the Garmin and stood at my
shoulder issuing course corrections. At times we had less
than forty centimeters under the keel and were feeling our way forward at a
crawl. But the Navionics data was showing no depth at all. After one hour
of this the echo sounder settled down at a steady 2.2 metre
under the keel, we made sail and ran on towards the next waypoint where we
planned to anchor and use what remained of the night for a rest
stop.
But true to the forecast, the cold front rushed in
at around one thirty and brought with it thirty knots of wind.
We furled the sails and decided to anchor in the middle of nowhere but in
shallow water, about one mile of a small uninhabited island called Mangrove Cay.
The new wind kicked up choppy waves and turned up the volume on everything on
deck and in the rigging. The anchor dragged and triggered the alarm, the wheel
came unlocked and let the rudder bang about. Somehow we all managed to get
a few hours sleep.
Thursday 9 a.m. We're under way again. Tom has
proposed a new routing keeping us in deeper water and around three more
shoals. We aim to arrive at an island with the strange name of Allan's Pensacola
Cay and anchor in its lee.
Tom often delivers locally built power boats from a
company called Albury Brothers, you can find out about them at www.alburybrothers.com
We have a new satellite
phone number (in order to switch to a cheaper calling plan we had to accept a
new number) +870 773 231 755
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