Paralyzed in Paradise.

Note from 2009: The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley. I had to google to get Robert Burns’ actual words, and now half of you won’t know what it means, but I like this version. It makes me feel like a pirate or a lady on a sailing ship headed for the new world. These words turned out to be the theme of our visit to Rose Island. Maybe the whole cruise. Hey! Maybe my whole life! Maybe yours, too, for that matter. I’m not complaining; I’m pretty good at rolling with the punches, but Rose Island turned out to be a test of our spirits.

Wednesday, April 30, 2003

We decided to stay at Rose Island for a day to lick our wounds. The morning started out sunny along with our dispositions. Then, lines of thunderstorms with twenty to thirty-five knot winds moved across the sky throughout the remainder of the day.

I stayed inside and tried to finish plotting our course for the rest of the trip to the Turks and Caicos, so I wouldn’t have to think about it again. I felt like I’d missed half of our cruise with my nose buried in charts and travel guides. I wanted to get it over with.

Here’s how it worked: We had charts on the laptop where I created waypoints to guide us around shallow water or rocks and on to our destination. The combination of waypoints made up our route. This I’d download to the GPS. Then all we had to do was follow the white line that zigzagged across a black screen. After hours of plotting, I discovered that the charts on the laptop were not accurate. I’d wasted hours of time and I had absolutely no confidence in my route. If my route was off by just a little, it could be like driving your car down the canal that borders the highway.

Wayne and I talked about it and decided to ride twenty miles out of our way to get around Rose Island instead of using the cut between Rose and Nassau. Looking back, I think we were paralyzed with fear. Our first ever attempt to read the water and we demolished our skiff. And the further we got from home, the scarier it was. Not scary, like we’re-gonna-die scary, but scary like we’re-gonna-lose-everything-we-own-and-go-back-home-with-our-tails-between-our-legs-looking-like-a-couple-of-big-chumps scary.

Sometime during the day, we noticed the anchor wasn’t holding. Wayne changed from the claw anchor to a different style, a large danforth, shearing a big flap of skin off the top of his knuckle in the process. After much animated dialogue, we re-anchored. Throughout the day and into the evening, we checked our position on the GPS to see if the new anchor was holding, as there were rocks and islands within sight in every direction.

This is no fun, I thought.

At 9:00 p.m., another squall came through, this time from the east. Anchored north of Rose Island, we were exposed to high winds and a rapid succession of three to four foot waves. The wind whistled and howled, and the boat rocked back and forth, to and fro like a top running out of spin. Another check of the GPS revealed that the new anchor was dragging.

Using two anchors is not an uncommon practice in the Bahamas where currents can be strong and holding can be poor. In the twilight, Wayne got in the dinghy, engaged the engine and started to ride around to the bow of the boat. The plan was for me to drop an anchor down to him. Then, he would motor away from the boat to some mystical position, and drop the anchor from the dinghy. As he motored around, the outboard sputtered and stalled. He paddled back to the boat. Standing in the dinghy, Wayne pulled himself around the side of the boat using his hands. At the bow, I lowered the anchor down to him. Then, he motored (The outboard actually worked this time) to the desired location while I let out line. He dropped the hook and I pulled it taut. The motor sputtered and stalled. Holding on to the anchor rode, he pulled himself hand over hand back to the bow. Then he inched his way around to the stern, arriving there just as the last smudge of light disappeared on the horizon. The mission was ultimately successful and as of today we haven’t moved.

Thursday, May 1, 2003

For all of you who have emailed and said that you are “living vicariously through us,” I have two words—CRUISING SUCKS! Where is that pink clapboard bar with the sand floor, the tight-bodied smiling bartender, his deep voice singing with a Caribbean lilt? Where are the cruisers and locals mingling happily, drinking strong rum drinks called Goombay Smashes and Bahamian Fire Bombs? Probably in Nassau--where we didn’t want to go!

We wanted to be off the beaten path and here we are. We’re out of bread, and I would kill for a hamburger. Last night, Wayne dreamed he was trying to park the boat in a parking lot, and woke up so depressed, a little voice in his head was telling him to turn the boat around and head back to Key West. He thinks he may be getting an ear infection. This happened on our cruise down the Intracoastal Waterway and I had to do all of the diving to cut monofilament and crab pot lines that had wrapped around the prop. If his ear doesn’t get better, I guess I’ll be diving the anchor. In the medicine cabinet, I found some antibiotic drops that expired in 1999 and plopped them unceremoniously into his ear.

Monitoring the weather revealed that we would have two more days of thunderstorms and five to eight foot seas. I’ve almost given up on using the Single Side Band radio to get the weather report. This is how a typical SSB forecast sounds:

“static crackle static Bahamas crackle crackle today west of seven two west north of two two north wind south east one five to two zero knots seas crackle static to eight feet east crackle static…….”

By the time I figure out where we are in regards to the latitude and longitude, they are talking about the next day. Instead, I dialed up the marine weather on the web. This is much more costly, as it requires use of the satellite phone, a dollar fifty a minute, after I use up the one hundred twenty that come with my fifty dollar a month fee. Because I don’t have an external antenna for the phone, I must go outside to use it. Last night, I was sitting on the deck, holding the phone in the air like the statue of liberty, as if holding the phone two feet closer to the ionosphere was going to improve my reception.

Still Thursday, 7:00 p.m.

Twice daily, catamarans full of tourists stop near us. The snorkelers in bulky orange life jackets jump off like lemmings, swim around in circles for thirty minutes, pile back on the boat and motor off, reggae music blaring. I can’t imagine what they are seeing down there. We’ve been fishing for three days, and have not caught one fish!

We need to get to civilization soon to restock. Last night, we had Mexican Lasagna made with refried beans, cheese, green chilies and tortillas instead of noodles. Tonight, we had smoked salmon alfredo over rice with canned spinach and the last of the tomatoes vinaigrette. If we don’t catch a fish soon, we may have to resort to baked beans, as my creative impulses are about to become severely limited by the available ingredients. No wonder cruising books are always filled with god-awful recipes like “Tuna Surprise”—one can of tuna, one can of cream of mushroom soup, one jar of salsa.

The most stimulation we had all day was when on three occasions, birds flew into the boat. This was a first for us, and Chris became highly animated, bolting about the boat, flying from bench to table to dashboard in seconds, knocking down whatever crossed his path, leaping into the air in pursuit of the pretty little things. I was as excited as he—jumping around and laughing one second and oohing and aahing with concern for the bird the next. Wayne just sat there. The birds all escaped unscathed to the chagrin of our feline friend.

For further entertainment, I tried listening to Bahamian radio. One station played what sounded like gospel rap, another reggae rap, and the third gave the local obituaries, in which they recited every name of twenty-four grandchildren and seventeen great-grandchildren—Janelle, Danielle, Valentino, Cleopatra, Chanille……. Boring!!!

I just checked www.marineweather.com, after seeing some blue in the sky. Apparently, the weather has turned around, so we OUT OF HERE tomorrow. Enough Camp Granada, Polyanna here we come! We are off to the Exumas tomorrow morning.

Friday, May 2, 2003

If I were manic, I’d be elated tonight. Instead, I am content and looking ahead with cautious optimism. This morning, contrary to the sunny weather forecast, a huge anvil-shaped thundercloud loomed over us, then exploded with high winds and torrential rain, causing us, to once again postpone our departure from Rose Island. We tangled up on the sofa and read books.

By afternoon, the sun was shining and Wayne and I went on a fixing frenzy. A turn of a screw fixed the outboard (or at least we thought so). The water maker seemed to be working fine; consulting the manual revealed that if it stopped working while underway, the saltwater intake might need to be changed (not something we could do while cruising). We switched two wires, and the autopilot stopped turning us in circles. Cleaning and re-gapping the spark plugs had the generator purring like a kitten.

Lastly, we fixed the Flowscan. I won’t attempt to explain how this baby works, but basically, it monitors the efficiency of the engines. For months, the numbers on the gauges seemed screwy. Today, we found the switch that allowed us to set the number of cylinders. And finally, we turned one of the toggle switches on the dash upside-down so that selecting gallons per hour did not display the miles per gallon and vice versa. Now, the Flowscan works.

We’d been moping around since we arrived here on Tuesday (Now, it’s Friday). But, after fixing everything, we were feeling quite self-satisfied. As we cleaned up our tools and manuals, a rubber dinghy approached our boat. I’m a big believer in creating your own luck, the power of positive thinking, what goes around, comes around, and every other idiom you can think of that means the same thing. If I were religious, I’d say that God sent us two angels in an inflatable chariot.

Sandy and Valt had been cruising the Bahamas since November. They came aboard to share a bottle of wine and a few tepid beers. Sandy was what my Uncle Hil would call an “attractive, well-preserved blonde.” Valt had Ronald Reagan’s hair and Dudley Doright’s chiseled features. They were all smiles and loving life in the Bahamas. What a stark contrast to the couple we met in this same anchorage on the afternoon of our arrival. And to us.

Sandy and Valt told us stories of the places we had not yet visited. While we were sitting around on our boat, not catching any fish and having a pity party, they were taking advantage of the intermittent sunshine to snorkel and catch a big grouper. They were compiling a list of the ten most annoying things about cruising the Bahamas. The first one was “I got sand in my sandals while walking on the beach”. The second was “I lost my place in my book when a fish got on my line.”

We told them of our concerns about reading the water and how we planned on traveling an extra 20 miles to go around Rose Island, avoiding the rocks south of us. They told us about the Explorer charts they had on CD. Unlike ours, they are detailed and very accurate. Loading the software on their PC, then connecting the PC to the GPS, places a representation of their boat right on the computer screen, giving a picture of the boat moving across the chart. What looks like a virtual mine field of plus signs and asterisks on the computer is really not so scary. The centimeter between rocks represents fifty or more feet. They promised to make us a CD of the Explorer charts and bring it to us in the morning.

“Please! Please! Please! Stop raining and blowing and let us leave tomorrow morning,” I mumbled as I sat on the deck later that evening.

“What?” Wayne’s voice came from inside of the cabin.

“Nothing. Just talking to the cat.”