Overnight Sail to Eleuthera

Days 54 & 55— Night Passage to Spanish Wells, North Eleuthera
Today is Sunday, January 25, 2009. We spent the day preparing for our ocean passage to Eleuthera. For us that means putting the dinghy on the deck and hauling the outboard motor onto the stern, tying down all the deck items (water & gas & diesel cans), entering all the GPS waypoints into both the hard-wired GPS on the navigation station and the hand-held GPS we keep in the cockpit, stowing any loose items down below, taking the sail covers off, double checking the weather, and trying to do some napping. The last part is the hardest—that napping before heading out for a night-long sail in the ocean rarely works for us.
Our plan was to sail the whole way. The trick to an over-night passage is to time your travel so that you arrive on the other side in daylight so you can see the inlets, etc. that need to be negotiated. If you are motoring, computing arrival time is pretty easy: the trip was approximately 50 nautical miles and we can motor at 6 or 7 knots so the crossing would take about seven or eight hours. We, however, were interested in sailing—which means we needed to do a lot of guessing about wind speed. The weather predictions led us to believe that there would not be much wind. We guessed that we’d be lucky to average 3 or 4 knots under sail. That calculation estimates twelve to seventeen hours.
We headed out of Little Harbour, Abaco as the light faded around 6 pm. With the twelve to seventeen hour guess, we figured this would give us enough daylight to see our way out onto the ocean and would arrive on the other side of the Northeast Providence Channel just at sunrise or later. Nice mathematical calculations—right?
Well, the wind in the Channel was great—too great! We were sailing along briskly at 6 to 7 knots per hour—yikes! The solution was to slow the boat down—what a strange concept! So, we reefed in the jib and de-powered the main by moving the traveler to windward which causes air to spill out of the sail. Although these measures helped, we still sailed so fast that it became clear we would get to land before we could see it. Finally, we hove-to and just loitered off shore for about an hour in the early morning dark.
As soon as the sun came up around 6:30 or 7:00 am on Monday, January 26th, we sailed south between Egg Island and Little Egg Island onto the Great Bahama Bank. From there we pressed on to Spanish Wells, North Eleuthera. We stopped long enough to top off the fuel even though we had not used much. We were hoping to get fresh water from the fuel dock folks, but it was not to be. They only had city cistern water that is not really drinkable. The nice guy at the fuel dock offered to call the local water company to arrange to have RO (reverse osmosis) water delivered to our boat. We were too tired to even think about that. We needed to tie up to a mooring and sleep. The same fellow told us who to contact on VHF to rent a mooring—you just call a guy named Bandit—hummmm.
Here are pictures of downtown Spanish Wells from our mooring (I mean Bandit’s mooring).