Our plan for the Jumentos trip was to return to George Town Thursday afternoon in time for the beginning of the Bahamian Sloop National Regatta. We also looked forward to stopping at Buena Vista Cay near Raccoon one night, and a stop at Flamingo Cay one night with a little time to enjoy each. Those plans were based on a 10 day weather forecast from five days ago so naturally changes are not unexpected. The change this time is that a strong east wind is to arrive sooner than the forecast which meant we needed to get out of the Jumentos and back to the George Town by Tuesday. No problem, we just needed to head north a few days sooner. Leaving today we could still get short visits to Buena Vista and Flamingo, so we headed north from Hog Cay at 8AM with the jib and main up and the winds out of east at about 12mph. The skies were overcast and looking a bit dark to the northeast but we have seen plenty of these passing showers in the Bahamas, so no problem.
About an hour into the trip, as were approaching Raccoon Cay, the skies started looking even darker. Harry had been using our radar to track the rain cells and so far they were passing ahead or behind us. But now, the one on the horizon looked like it was going to give us a good soaking. Then we saw a bolt of lightning off in the distance. Counting one-mississippi, we judged that this bolt was 2-3 miles away. It is rare for lightning to strike a sailboat but it does happen. 99% of the time it doesn't damage the integrity of the hull but it almost always fries all the electronics. Since we were familiar with Raccoon Cay and it was just two miles to the east it was an easy decision to put away the sails and motor over to wait out the squall. In addition to being familiar with Raccoon, we knew it had high hills that would both help to block any squall related winds, and that might be more of an attraction to lightning than our shorter metal mast.
When there is lightning we put all of our most important electronics (phone, tablet, laptop, handheld radio, satellite communicator, etc) into the unplugged microwave that acts as a faraday cage to avoid the pulse from a nearby lightning strike from damaging them.
By 11AM we were settled with the sky darkening and the lightning now less than a mile away. Once this blew through we could continue on our way. Then came the rain with wind increasing to a steady 20 with higher gusts. Suddenly it started raining even harder and the wind continued to increase. We had our instruments off but estimate that the gusts were at least 40mph. The biggest gusts would swing Juno around and cause her to heel over more than one usually experiences on anchor. This continued for an hour where every five minutes or so another big blast of wind would come through. The lightning got closer but we never heard any close by. After an hour of this the worst of the storm moved through but the winds were still 20-30 mph with lots of rain. This one was over but it was clear that there were more coming so we settled down to wait until tomorrow to continue on.
No comments:
Post a Comment