Getting Ready for a 5 Day Passage

We have been in Turks & Caicos for almost a week now and are only allowed to stay here for 7 days.  Our 7 day mark is up tomorrow, which was the day we were planning to leave, only we had a major problem come up on our way to South Caicos 2 days ago.  Our front sail or Jib has a built in cover around the outside edge to protect it when it is rolled up and it has started coming apart at the seam.  We rolled it in immediately after we noticed it ripping and our plan is to take it down and try to repair it with my sewing machine.  If we can't fix it ourselves our plans may have to change.  The only problem is that we can't take it down with any wind and the wind has been blowing at 20 knots here the last 2 days.  The wind is supposed to die down a little tomorrow and progressively more until Wednesday.  We are hoping the customs officials will be lenient with us and allow us to stay a few extra days.  We have taken advantage of the time on the boat the last few days and worked on some boat projects, did the laundry, and made Christmas brunch.  I was unsure if we would have a decent grocery store between last week and Christmas so I took advantage and bought my Christmas brunch ingredients and made it today!  We technically celebrated Christmas 10 days early, but on a boat time doesn't' seem to change so it made no difference to us.  I suppose we will also get a head start on our new year next week!

After our 12 hour crossing when we left at midnight and got pounded by the Atlantic we stayed in a marina for 2 days.  The guy that built the marina started 20 years ago and has finally got everything up and running.  He was the most generous and trusting guy we have met yet.  We had about 7 gallons of gas left in our tank and all of our jerry cans were empty so we needed to fuel up and that is how we found this gem of a marina.  South Side Marina and Bob, the owner, was just what we needed after the frightening night on the sea.  After staying 2 nights, recharging our batteries, washing the boat, filling the water tank, filling the propane, having Bob drive and pick us up from the store, and filled the fuel tank with $620 worth of gas Bob told us to come back later tonight and we would settle up.  He had another boat waiting to get fuel and knew we were planning on anchoring fairly close and coming in to the weekly cruisers BBQ at his bar that night.  We could have easily sailed away and stuck him with the $1000 bill and never looked back, but we didn't.  We took the dinghy in that night to the BBQ and told Bob goodbye.  We are now fully stocked with fuel, groceries, and water.  Ready for a few days at sea.  The next pass should take about 5 days.  With our luck it will probably take 7 days!!!  We will keep the delorme going every hour so you can watch our progress, and will update with messages if anything significant happens.

Thanks Stray Cat for our hats

Fueled up and ready for a crossing!

For Sale.  Who would want to live here?

Preston decorated our boat for Christmas!

Catch Up

I thought I would catch you up on a few of the questions you all asked in the comments.  And add a few pictures of moments I didn't have time to show.

The broken goggles was a lesson learned for us.  We had been having some problems with the current in our anchorage and had reset the anchor 4 times, once in the middle of the night.  First thing the next morning Dan got up and decided to check the anchor and make sure it plowed in.  He put his goggles on and dove off the front of the boat holding his mask to his face and his tempered glass mask shattered.  Luckily he had his eyes closed!  We had heard not to dive with your mask on and now we know why.  From that point on we all jump off vertically when our masks are on.

Off Allen's Cay Preston pulled up a big conch shell and put it on the back steps.  A few minutes later it was trying to crawl back into the water, and it wasn't a conch.  It was the biggest hermit crab known to man.  Has anyone every seen a hermit crab this big?  Usually they are the size of a nickel or quarter.  This guy was as big as my head.

Preston likes to take pictures of all the dead carcases we stumble upon.  Here are a few of his growing collection of photos.

We heard back from the people that put the message in the bottle and found out that it was thrown overboard somewhere near Nassau by a couple from Washington off a cruise ship.  Which means a lone bottle traveled 400 miles weaving between islands in 10 months or less with no propulsion or sails (without breaking).  This gives us hope that we will make it 33,000 miles around the world using our sails (without breaking)!

Burning the Midnight Fuel

We moved anchorages to the Southeast point of Mayaguana to stage our pass to Turks & Caicos.  There was no sand to anchor in and after our anchor caught on a tiny hole in the rock bottom we set the anchor alarm and waited out the day.  We were all wanting to go ashore to beach comb, but with the anchor only set in a small hole and big swells crashing on the beach we decided only one person could go.  We sent our treasure hunter, Preston.  He went on a walk-a-bout for the day and returned just before sunset with……….

Preston found rope and tied all his treasures together to swim back to the boat.  As he was swimming back my mind was racing…..where are we going to put all this junk?….some of those buoys are huge…Turns out he brought it all back to play a joke on me.  Though he let me sweat it out for a while before he told me he didn't plan on keeping all of it.  He also found a message in a bottle.  The message had faded off the paper, but luckily I brought a few art supplies and charcoal was one of them.  As I rubbed the charcoal across the paper the message began showing up.  We will email the people on the message to let them know their bottle was found.  It was really fun to find something someone else threw in the ocean.  It made our day!  We can't wait to hear back from them to find out where they threw it off their cruise ship and how far it traveled.  Our plan was to leave at midnight so we could pull through the Caicos Cut with the sun rising to see reefs.  

Well we were too impatient and didn’t wait for our weather window.  We left last night at midnight off the Southeast point of Mayguana.  As soon as we left the anchorage we were being tossed around by waves taller than our boat and some were crashing right over the side.  We battled for 11 hours the biggest swells we have ever seen.  It was a VERY long and uncomfortable night.  We are now safely tied to a dock at a marina in Turks & Caicos.  We are dead tired and may just sleep for 3 days straight.  Preston and Dan took the grunt of it outside all night getting splashed by salt spray.  I hid inside with Lucy because I couldn’t deal with watching each wave grow bigger and bigger.  We were to the Caicos Cut by 8:30am this morning and it took another 3 hours to get to the marina.  Those 3 hours just about killed us, because we were here and we made it, just not quite yet.  We did have an unexpected surprise as we were coming thought the cut.  A pod of dolphins, maybe 8-9 joined our boat for quite sometime and we all 3 stood up front not minding the sea spray as they played off our bow jumping about.