A scary day on the water!

Tues. May 15th, 2012

Storms rolled on by our anchorage yesterday afternoon and evening. The majority out in the distance provided quite a light show. One squall did pass overhead but we enjoyed the fresh water bath it provided for Laughter.

Today was one of those experiences that causes you to think about the need to have all your affairs in order. .A bit of an exaggeration, maybe, but when the weather turns ugly and mother nature is in control rather than you many things start to cross your mind.

Sitting on the beach when black thunderheads roll across the water and waves of blinding rain that hide the horizon pass in the distance is fascinating to watch but to find yourself in its midst is another story. This morning looked as if cloudy skies would prevail but no sight of a storm so we pulled anchor and headed out.  it looked as if we would might catch up and follow several sail boats that were off in the distance.  We were about a mile out of the anchorage when the first squall came into sight. We put the pedal to the metal, so to speak, to out run it and were successful. Once we knew it was behind us Tom put out the fishing lines hoping to catch dinner sometime during the 35 mile trip to Great Sale Cay,  All was going well until we made our turn, the sky directly in front of us was black!  A few moments later Tom spotted a water spout forming. It too was now in our path. There were three boats in front of us, chattering on the radio about what to do. Two of them  choose to keep going through the squall. About  the same time we spotted a second larger water spout. At that point the third boat, a trawler turned coming toward us. He was going to attempt to go behind this storm. We chose to do the same.  We came around the back side, turned and headed toward clear sky’s. I started to relax but it only lasted a few minutes..It was apparent that we were going to catch the tail end of the squall. The wind kicked up and Laughter bounced and rolled as we found ourselves in the midst of rain so intense we could barely see the bow of the boat.  Somewhere out there were several large rocks that we had to keep well off our port side and we had to rely on our chart plotter and radar to make sure we kept them there. Thankfully the intense rain only lasted a short time.

We were the 5th boat to pull into the anchorage late this afternoon. The sky’s behind us still black the thunder loud and the lightning bright. We were thankful that our experience with the squall only involved intense rain.  We watched as boat after boat appeared from under the squall line as if they were passing through a curtain on a huge stage. By nightfall there were 14 boats in the anchorage.

We are often asked if we were ever afraid on our travels. Today I was.