West Caicos Marina

03.28.12

As Dave and I were on deck pouring five gallons of diesel from the jerry jug into the fuel tank, two bearded guys dinghied over from neighboring boats.  Bruce from Sacramento and Axel from Alaska and their wives are on Celtic Rover and Azaya.  They, along with a couple on Kalibrie were heading south to Luperón.  They’d been listening in on the conversations on the VHF between Lutz on Spray and us.  (Dave always says the VHS is like the old party line telephones of yesterday because you can switch channels to listen in on others.)  Bruce and Axel were interested in our departure timing and possibly going together.  We told them to speak with Lutz as he has more information and experience with this route than we had.  On the afternoon of the 25^th, we all decided to motor to the west end of Abrahams Bay for an easy early morning exit for Luperón, Dominican Republic the next day. We were all settled when some time after dark, a voice came over the VHF from a boat that was about a mile off.  We could see his mast light.  He asked about the entrance between the reef and the bay.  Bruce told him that if he followed the route on his chart, he would avoid the coral heads.  He came in with no problems and anchored behind the five of us.

The next morning we five boats left after confirmation of the weather from Chris Parker.  We were about a mile out when we heard last night’s new arrival request any weather information.  He’d woken up and saw that all of us had departed and wondered if we knew something that he didn’t know.  No, we were all simply going to the same place at the same time.  He must have thought it was a good idea because he showed up the next day a bit after we’d all anchored. 

We didn’t, however, make it to Luperón.  The wind was good but did not clock around soon enough for us to sail and keep our SE course, so we decided to go to Plan B and break up the trip by stopping in the Turks and Caicos to wait out the upcoming blow.  We went a little farther north than we’d planned but found an extremely protected harbor called West Caicos Marina.  Like many other marina projects in the Bahamas, for whatever reason, this marina was under construction and unfinished with no sight of any work underway.  The harbor was an excellent place to pass the few days of strong winds.  It was small so two of the boats rafted up together and we rafted up with Spray.  It’s fun to do this for a few days because you can visit your friends more easily and also share things when needed.  We have our humongous Yanmar generator, so Lutz ran his extension cord over and plugged in so he didn’t have to run his portable generator, which actually they don’t need so much because they have solar panels to top off their batteries.  Lutz showed us how to tie a line from our bow to his anchor chain so the pull on the chain was equal.  Later we also dropped our anchor as extra insurance.  So far the winds are just 20 with gusts of 25, but we are barely swaying because of the protection from the 8 foot swells outside in the ocean.  We hope to leave tomorrow.  It seems that we rarely have ideal sailing conditions, and tomorrow will be no different.  Other than high swells, at least they will be behind us.  The wind should be OK, but not great.  We hope we can sail without the motor at least for several hours.

We did not go on the island because other than the defunct marina, there was nothing within walking distance nor did we need anything.  We did not have to check in and nobody bothered us about doing so.  We were happy to be there as the winds gusted to 25 and although just outside the harbor the swells were 8 to 10 feet, it was calm inside with no rolling at all.