Sunday, February 12, 2012

Georgetown to Mayaguana(Abraham's Bay)

We finally left George Town after nearly a month of activities; volleyball, beach parties, dances and meeting
lots of boaters. They also have restaurants and a grocery store and free water made by reverse osmosis which means it is very pure.

After much debate on Friday with our 2 other boating partners, Bob and Carol from Time Enough II and Chris and
Sheila from Never Bored, we all decided to head out of Georgetown at 4:00pm and head for Mayaguana. According
to our weather Guru, Chris Parker, there was going to be a window of opportunity for us. By midnight Time Enough II
had dead batteries and headed into Rum Cay and assured us that they would be fine and that we should continue so
we did. Ed was feeling pretty sick from the action of the waves and Ann just wanted to sleep and was zombie-like.
We finally arrived this morning at 2:00am. We anchored just inside the entrance so it was very rolly but later
in the morning we moved further down and it was more comfortable. At one point we were ready to turn around
and head back to Florida and sell the boat but we made it. Sailing is supposed to be fun but is sometimes a lot of stress when long distances are involved.

Tomorrow and in the next few days we will explore Mayaquana, a little out of the way island on the way to the Dominican Republic (DR) that has a protected achorage providing a stepping point to the Turks and Caicos islands. Given the prevailing easterly winds sailors must overnight to it from Rum Cay to the north. We did not stop at Rum this time because we had a short weather window to get here. We might have been able to continue to the T&Cs but 25K winds were expected in the morning, we would not have arrived until about 10AM and we were dead tired already. So, we are stuck here for a while until the seas and winds cooperate. And indeed the low pressure front passed us this morning on its way south and the north wind is as forecast. We have it pretty easy as sailors these days with accurate forecasts and GPS to find our way in and out of places.

Ed calls this wind "electric" because the wind generator whirs away completely charging our batteries for which we are thankful because our solar panels alone cannot. While sailing it can keep up with the chart plotter, GPS, radio, instruments and autopilot which steers better than we can under almost all conditions.

Next stop: T&Cs, then the DR.

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