Our passage from Egg Island at Spanish Wells to Little Harbour in the Abacos was a roller coaster. The swells ranged from 5-foot to 10-foot rollers that were staged about every 7 seconds apart. This made for a long ten plus hour passage, but it was nowhere near as miserable as the passage we took from Cumberland to St. Augustine at the beginning of this sailing season. On that trip I white knuckled the whole way. We had great wind, so we sailed the entire way with the engines off until we reached the cut.
One of the boats ahead of us radio’d and said he was catching Mahi-Mahi to make sure we had our rod out. Bubba had to reel this guy in with the boat going 6 kts. The first good fish on since we started this season. We have had a few barracudas but those are given back to the ocean. With the waves and the wind going crazy we opted to not do a photo shoot with the Mahi and instead got him into the bucket as fast as we could, so we were both safe and secure. Seriously, it was so rollie you could not stand up on the boat without bracing yourself.
Fish On!
We arrived at Little Harbour to transit to cut with good timing. I let a monohull go in front of me just so I could see how the current was. From the cut we motored to Lynyard Cay to drop anchor for the night. We would only be staying here for one night as we wanted to get to Marsh Harbour on Sunday to get anchored down for the big blow that was coming our way. When I say big blow I mean BIG BLOW. We had not rode a storm out quite like this one on anchor before.
We would have a short motor to Marsh Harbour, about four hours total. We arrived and got anchored in time to go ashore to Snappa’s to grab a bite to eat and stretch our legs. Marsh Harbour is slowly getting rebuilt. If you recall, Dorian sat over this part of the Bahamas for 36 hours in 2019. In comparison to it’s sister island of Hope Town there does not appear to be as much outside investment here.
The highest wind I saw was at 35 kts. Our Rocna anchor worked like a champ. We had a small monohull next to us, a sweet couple from Lake Tahoe, CA. We were a little close as our anchor line extended but it all worked out well.
We would ride out the storm from late Sunday as the winds began to shift and clouds rolled in, until mid-Thursday afternoon. We were about to go stir crazy and the crew was ready to jump ship. I have to say our Starlink worked like a champ during the whole storm. This thing has been a game changer for cruisers.
On Thursday we went back to Snappas to grab a late lunch/early dinner and then walked close to a mile to and from the grocery store. Maxwell’s is the largest grocery store we have been to yet. They had a wide selection of food to choose from.
On Friday we would be making the short 1.5-hour journey over to Hope Town.
