Abacos Oct 23 Manjack/Pensacola Hurrican Hole

Wednesday, October 23    Manjack to Pensacola Cay  (17 NM)

On a typical sailing morning:  I get up turn off the anchor light, turn on Lowrance (depth/plotter) and Otto (autohelm), make coffee and put on my deck shoes (so very handy on dew laden boat); Gerry charts a course, hauls up the anchor and I pilot us out of the anchorage. We both set way points but Gerry usually does the first one, checking for things like islands and big rocks that might be in the way.  I then double check it looking for those pesky little rocks that only show up when you zoom in and scroll along the entire course. When I set the way point he double checks. When we arrive Gerry drops the anchor (because I suck at it), and I stand at the helm waiting to put her into reverse if necessary. I turn off Otto and Lowrance, make dinner and Gerry turns on the anchor light at dusk.

But this wasn't a typical day. Its 9:30 a.m., and I'm deciding about breakfast when Mother Nature takes control. The wind suddenly picks up and got stronger and stronger and then it poured and then we started to drag. Gerry had the Ipad on so the anchor alarm went off (see note *). He started the engine, idled us forward, and waited to see if the anchor had recaught. We checked the GPS and we were still dragging and were moving at one knot towards the shore! Gerry pulled up the anchor I put her in gear and we got out of Dodge. The rain immediately stopped and the sun popped out, but the wind shifted to NW the very least desirable direction. 

Off we went bouncing through 2 foot waves with a good blustery wind on our nose looking for a place to hide for the night. Powell Cay was out of the question (no shelter from NW) so we headed for Pensacola a few hours away hoping the wind would either die or shift. Weather forecasts are wrong everywhere. There was a place called Hurricane Hole at Pensacola but the chart showed blue water and no soundings so we had no idea if we could get in. White on our chart is good, blue questionable, turquoise too shallow. 

Shipwreck, no not us.

 Saw this on the way. Hard to see in the photo but this boat is completely out of the water on a rock. Didn't know we would soon be in a similar but not as dangerous situation.

Gerry says if you haven't run aground you haven't been anywhere interesting so in we crept, slowly. Was better than getting bounced around in open water or at least that was the thought. We got part way in at levels between 5.0 and 6.2 and when it was consistently at 5.0 we tried to see if we had swing room and got stuck in the mud. You have to add 1.5' to the depth sounder number to get the real depth. We decided to stay awhile and wait for the tide to lift us off (as if we had a choice). 

looking into the channel

looking out to sea

1:30, the tide is going out. Won't be the first time we've sat on the bottom but last time we weren't surrounded by mangroves and what monsters do they harbour? Around 4 we paddled up the inlet and much to our surprise the hurricane hole got much larger than indicated on the chart, and there were 2 pilings. We tried measuring the depth with a paddle and guesstimate it was well over 6'. Had someone actually bothered to chart this we would have been floating free in a large enough basin for more than a dozen boats of our size.

tried to capture immensity of "hole"

Ramblynn's mast; one piling

 

Got back to the boat and discovered the monsters were no-see-ums and they have rung the dinner bell. We let them torment us for a while then fixed the companionway screen, put in the hatch screens and placed a mosquito coil on the front deck in front of one hatch. Oddly enough the boat has not tipped over, yet. 

6:30 - waiting for the big crash over to one side, death by no-see-ums or death by mosquito coil. 

7:30 - raining, have to close the hatches so now it could be death by asphyxiation. Without the fan it would be death by heat exhaustion. 

9:30 - anchor chain moved, maybe we'd soon be out, Gerry doesn't want to wait for the next high tide at noon. All we managed to do is get turned in the right direction then ground to a halt. High tide is 11:47 we must wait, at least the no-see-ums have gone to bed.

12:15 a.m. (after getting stuck twice more) we're out of the hurricane hole thanks to Gerry's skill and perseverance (which I thought bordered on madness) and despite my poor direction giving skills. 

I was afraid we'd blow the engine so I would have waited for tomorrow's high tide which was higher and in daylight. The moon came out to help us but Lowrance that son of a bitch who got us in there refused to work telling us we had 60 feet of water. As soon as we were safely in deeper water (13') he worked just fine.  The Abacos are shallow, averaging between 12-22 feet (at least where we've been). 

We never listed to one side, I suppose we sank well enough into the mud. We've anchored just around the corner, wind has died, waves almost non existent.

Note * the Ipad chart plotter NavX is great except for one flaw. The anchor alarm will not wake the Ipad up, so unless it's on we don't know if we're drifting. Simple games will wake it up with stupid notices and yet something as important as this will not. What were the programmers thinking? I'm hoping that once we download the manual (it didn't come with one) we will find more precise instructions than the useless Help button which tells you what you can do but not how. We'll have to also find a manual for Lowance. He came with a tiny 15 page manual of diagrams impossible to read.

SPOT