Of Rainbows and Waterspouts

Waiting in George Town

For anyone on a boat, weather is the most important thing to consider before you untie the dock lines or pull up the anchor.  You don't want to be out sailing when it's bad and you don't want to miss an opportunity of good weather, especially when you're trying to make time, like us.  But, 'tis the season of afternoon thunderstorms. So we waited in George Town, for the storms to clear.


We took a couple of days to get out of the Bahamas, trying to avoid squalls because of the hard rain and strong and squirrely wind they bring. We did manage to avoid most of them and afterword we saw some beautiful rainbows (we stopped counting how many) and some amazing views of the sky:  

                                                                                        

Ring of Fire

                     One of many

2 Water Spouts

The most amazing (and a little frightening) thing we saw:  waterspouts. Very glad they were  far away from us. 
A waterspout is basically a tornado over the water. Here is a view of two waterspouts coming out of the clouds as we made our way over the banks of the Bahamas.  Apparently they are very common in Florida and the  Caribbean in the summer months.  I'm not too anxious to be this close to one again.

We arrived in Fernandina Beach, Florida six days after leaving George Town.  That included 5 overnight passages - the most we've ever done.  I'm not a big fan of sailing at night. I mean, it can be cool, there are millions of stars in the sky, and if the seas are fairly flat, it can be a smooth ride. But what I don't like:  getting woken every few hours to stand outside in the humid, salty air getting sticky and damp, trying to figure out if the lights in the distance are a huge freighter on a collision course for you, and trying to occupy your mind for hours while you are anxiously awaiting your time to be up, so you can go back to sleep.  They are long hard nights for me, I was ready to jump ship a few times, but then I thought Bill might get mad at me for making him sail the boat all the way back by himself, so I didn't.

At night, I find my depth perception is reduced to about zero. I can't tell if a boat is a 100 yards or 5 miles away because there is nothing to reference it against. While you can determine which direction a ship is going by its lights, you can't be sure how fast it's going (but definitely faster than you) or how far away it is.  That's very scary.  But on our boat, we do have a way of knowing because we have a system called AIS (Automatic Identification System). AIS receives information from commercial ships within a radius up to 36nm around you and lets you know everything about the ship: it's dimensions, destination, course, speed, if you're going to collide, time until impact, etc.  I love it, everyone should have one, it's better than radar.   It works off the GPS system and it's constantly recalculating so you know within seconds of altering course if you have avoided disaster. It also has an alarm to let you know when there is a ship in your range. It definitely helps me sleep better knowing that we have it. Now, they need to make one of those for weather, so we can avoid storms!

This ship's stats: 486' long, 26' draft, 75' beam and speed of 15.5 kts. It passed 1nm off our port quarter. I don't like distances shorter than 1nm - so this was as close as it gets for me.

So we slogged on until we finally reached Florida. Our original plan was not to stop until we reached North Carolina, but that bit the dust when we realized that Bill didn't buy enough food for us to last more than four days (remember, it took us 6). Next time, I'm in charge of grocery shopping! So, we needed to stop at least for food, to clear customs and immigration and, more importantly, a shower and dinner.

Sunset in Fernandina