High Winds in Nassau Harbor

Our Saturday night ended with a front row seat to the Atlantis Resort's spectacular fireworks show; lucky us! It was a beautiful star filled night and continued to be calm until the cold front came by at 3am. Reinhart thought I was being my regular paranoid self when I was up with the wind, but I wasn’t the only one. I could see heads popping up out of hatches and shadowy figures on decks nearby. The boat behind us dragged anchor around 4am and took a while to re-anchor. The boat beside us followed suit at 5am. It certainly wasn’t boring with several cruise ships, cargo ships, and ferries entering the harbor at the same time the boats in the anchorage were playing musical chairs. Reinhart was up a couple times to check out the anchors; he wasn’t actually too worried about them, but he said it appeared like the neighborly thing to do since everyone else was out. We’ve seen higher winds in an anchorage before, these are gusting to 30 knots, but the holding ground isn’t very good here. The sunrise was lovely and I’m sure some of this crowd was especially happy to see some light.

It is around 11 am on Sunday and the mayhem continues; several boats gave up on their anchors this morning. Some decided to head out and brave the big seas. Others are just motoring around in circles in the anchorage; they’ll throw out an anchor every once in a while and haul it back in once the anchor drags. We don’t have out any fenders, but our dinghy acted as one when one of the motoring boats lost his concentration and drove into us. It sounds like there isn’t any decent dockage left either, since some of the folks have been calling around looking for something to tie up to. It’s a beautiful sunny, dry, and cool day though, but there’s no chance we are leaving the boat and going to shore with this kind of circus going on. Who needs to go to town with all of the excitement, though, we might miss something good. A seaplane landed during these high winds. That was exciting; it looked like it was going to dive into the water like a pelican, but he landed just fine.

Did I say the front came through!!?? Nope, those were the winds in front of the front. The front came through at 12:30 pm on Sunday. From a distance it just looked like a rain shower, I've see much blacker skies in the past week, but it turned out to be a shower, followed by a squall, followed by the winds. Consistent winds of 35 with gusts up to 45. Most of the boats around us dragged their anchors and spent the afternoon trying to re-anchor or motoring around. Several folks thought the worst was over this morning (including us) and had gone in to shore. They had to rush back and had a very hard time boarding their vessels. As for us, we held fine; our dinghy flipped over early on. That’s when I stopped having fun; Reinhart is still having a great time with it all though. We think the dinghy motor made it through fine, but it did lose all its fuel. We’ve heard our winds will be close to 30 all afternoon and finally drop back down to 20-25 tonight…so we really won’t be able to check things out until tomorrow morning. We heeled quite a bit during the highest gusts and anything that wasn’t battened down for sailing needs to find its home again.

Look at that, the sun is just peaking back out as I'm publishing this! We were originally planning on leaving tomorrow, but we are going to wait and decide until we’ve heard the weather in the morning. We expect the winds will be excellent for sailing on the tail end of this system, and we are really ready to leave, though, so if it isn’t tomorrow then it will be Tuesday. The further south we get, the less these cold fronts will affect us and we should have a higher percentage of calm days (although it looks like this particular front is reaching pretty far south). We’ll only be hoping for another cold front when it comes time to make our big sail to the Virgin Islands. Did we mention Nicol is planning on meeting us there…we are so excited about that!