The weather this season in the Bahamas has been unprecedented. Winter is known for cold fronts with clocking winds however the west component is usually weak. Most of the Bahamas don’t have good places to hide from west winds because it’s a long skinny island chain. This is a problem because the west winds for this storm were predicted to be around 40 knots, which is serious. We’ve spent a lot of time in Pipe Creek for storms so we decided to come here again. Instead of our usual spot in the south we chose a shallow anchorage on the north end. Due to the shallow draft of our boat we can anchor well away from most of the other boats which gives us a ton of room to swing around and hopefully keeps us out of the strong current of the deeper water.
The storm started off with a bang on Monday evening with a ferocious looking thunderstorm. Right at sunset (of course…) big black clouds rolled in and the winds began to howl. I hate thunderstorms anyway but I hate lightning the most. A lightning strike can disable or even sink a boat or at the very least make it extremely difficult dealing with insurance when we get back so I was a giant ball of anxiety for a few hours as this system passed through.
I only got a few pictures of the storm because I was terrified and we were more concerned with the boat than documentation. There was also no way to show the sheer amount of lightning popping off the entire time. Not cool.
The first wave of wind blew all night long and we had a pretty sleepless night tying down flapping lines, messing with the anchor bridle, and just listening to the boat move around at anchor and shake in the wind gusts. We made it to morning fairly unscathed however as we sat there enjoying the sunrise Jason realized that we were dragging our anchor and were almost on top of the islands behind us. We got the motor started quickly and slowly started to pull forward, fighting the strong winds the whole time. This boat is a giant pain in the ass to steer, especially in wind because it catches the bow and just pushes it sideways but we somehow got moved back forward and re-anchored with as minimal a fuss as could be expected at the time. We still don’t know what went wrong here. We have an oversized, quality anchor that’s never drug on us before. Maybe we didn’t have enough chain out? Maybe the spot we chose didn’t have as much deep sand as we thought? Either way after sitting there discussing the situation there was a small lull in the wind where it was only blowing 15 knots and we decided to move back north a bit right next to where the other boats were anchored. We anchored there once before and had it measured out but decided to move because the swell from the ocean was rolling in and rocking the boat. Now the swell was from a different direction and we just needed a safer spot to anchor. This time we let out over 100’ of chain and took our riding sail back down in case the windage was adding too much load to the anchor.
We’re now as prepared as we are going to be for the bigger storm that’s on its way to us. Turns out that the weather people actually categorized this as a tropical depression. No wonder it looked like a small hurricane on the charts. Awesome. Slowly the winds increased until they were just blowing constantly in the mid 30s. We saw multiple gusts to 40 knots with the highest at 43 knots. Officially the most wind we’ve ever seen! (Not a record I’m trying to break…) Luckily this all happened during the day and we could watch. The winds whipped up huge choppy wind waves that rolled through the anchorage coupled with the occasional driving rain storm. I tried to get a video but it doesn’t show how gnarly it was.
With the changes we made to the anchoring setup and our new location Onward didn’t move an inch! Eventually the winds calmed down a little bit and we survived another night.
This is probably the most stressful boat situation I’ve been in. Most of cruising is hiding from various forms of weather but this pretty much cemented that we’re not messing around with hurricane season, ever! This boat is going to be safely stowed away in early May!