Position: N 25 32.956 W 078 09.364
It’s a mass exodus from Bimini harbor Friday morning with everyone wanting to get across the banks while the weather holds for the next two days. When you are cruising whatever schedule you may or may not have is almost always governed by the weather. If you need to get somewhere and the wind is good, you go, or you may have to sit around for another couple of weeks waiting for another weather window!
The Great Bahama Bank is an enormous area of shallow water, surrounded by DEEP ocean water. We are heading for the Exumas, which is completely on the other side of the banks from Bimini. We could go around in the deep water but it’s much further. The banks were a bit intimidating for us ‘first timers’ as they are only about 25 feet deep in the deep bits and 0 (or less!) feet deep in the shallow bits. The good thing is that the water is so clear that you can always see the bottom and the deeper water is a darker shade of azure. As long as we stay in the darker water we are fine. So we spend the day, most of it out of sight of land, traversing the Banks along with several other sailboats and two trawlers. We holler at each other from time to time over the VHF radio, sharing stories of fish caught, wind strength and direction etc. Alone but still together!
Not long after we pull out of Bimini we notice that the steering feels a bit funny. Nothing really bad, but Mark goes down to check it out anyway. He doesn’t see anything obviously wrong so we carry on. The steering gradually worsens, but with nowhere to go by this time except the anchorage with the other boats, we carry on. At least it’s calm and there’s almost no strain on it.
After 12 hours and 70 miles we pull off the main route and several of us drop anchor for the night, the remainder carry on through the night to
Mark: “Holly molies!!”
Julie: “What?”
Mark: “Two of the four bolts that hold the steering quadrant together are hanging loose! They’ve stripped out and only the two on the other side are holding it all together!”
Julie: “How could that have happened?”
Mark: “Hmm… Remember that clunk we heard in Bimini when the tug’s prop wash was pushing us around? I bet it slammed the rudder all the way over, and the strain stripped the bolts out.”
Mark: “Yeah. Whew. Hope we can fix it.”
We drag out all the spares and dig through the piles to see if there are 2 bolts with the same thread that are a bit longer than the stripped ones. We find one that should work perfectly and another that we think can be rigged to work. Off Mark goes back down and somehow manages to get the whole thing back together. We think it should last long enough to get us to
We tidy up the tools and stow all the stuff from the basement down below in the cabin so we can maintain quick access to the quadrant in case something goes wrong again. We finally get to eat dinner sitting in the cockpit looking up at the stars. It is so dark here away from any civilization - the stars are really bright and we can see skillions of them!! If we weren’t so worn out we’d get out our constellation book and lie on deck and identify them. But we’re pretty beat so we’ll have to save that for another night.
