Tropical Storm = rain, wind, and.... panic!

As I sit here this morning in the pilothouse of Mother Ocean, typing away, it is a beautiful day with a few knots of wind out of the west.  The horrible weather from yesterday and last night seems a dim memory.  Now that the tropical disturbance or storm or whatever it was has moved off to the northwest, we can get back onto our 2022 Sea of Abaco Tour.  But let's review the events of yesterday.

Saturday dawned cloudy and very windy, confirming that we were going to skip the original plan of going to Marsh Harbour for the night.  NO ONE at all was moving around on the Sea of Abaco and we were staying put at the beautiful Hope Town Inn & Marina for at least another night.  Lee and Karen, aboard At Last, were a hundred yards away, tied to one of the marina's sturdy 7/8" line moorings.

I really didn't plan to write much of anything today.  Maybe a few pics of the windy harbour with one paragraph stating basically that we were stuck here with nothing to do but eat, drink, do maintenance chores, and play board games.  Pretty much everything in Hope Town was closed for the storm, so we all hunkered down for the forecast 35-knot winds.

                        Games and drinks in Mother Ocean's saloon

Everything was going pretty much to that plan until late in the afternoon.  About 5pm, several of us were sitting in Mother Ocean's saloon, playing "Shut the Box", not realizing the winds had increased dramatically.  Here in the marina basin, we are fairly well protected, so even though we were getting steady 30-knot winds with higher gusts, winds in the harbour were well over 40-knots.

Suddenly, Dennis looked up and said, "What the....!" as we all followed his gaze in time to see At Last go sailing by in the harbour, sideways and backwards, trailing the mooring float off the bow!  She had broken the almost-new 7/8" line on the  mooring and was out of control.

It was raining sideways as Dennis and I jumped into Mother Ocean's dinghy and went roaring after them.  Another yacht's tender was already there helping Karen disengage the remnants of the mooring line and float from At Last's bridle.  It was at that point that I ran over our own bowline, bringing the dinghy's engine to a halt!  In our haste to get away, neither Dennis nor I had secured the bow line inside the dinghy.  No matter, it only took me a few seconds to disengage the line from the prop and get going again.

In that time, Lee had the engines running and was attempting to get his boat under control.  We were almost alongside the fuel dock at Lighthouse Marina and I told Dennis to yell to At Last to get the boat to that dock anyway they could.  Unfortunately, the boat was blowing bow first out of the harbour, and that was the WRONG direction to be able to come alongside in 45-50 knot winds.

Lee yelled that he needed to continue out of the harbour in order to be able to get into the lee just a bit and turn At Last around.  So Dennis and I docked around the back of the fuel dock, climbed up on it and watched, hoping that Lee could get the GH37 turned around and headed back to us.  They blew perilously close to the sandbar outside the harbour, but Lee masterfully got At Last spun around and heading back towards us.

He needed pretty close to full throttle just to keep headway, and brought her in to a bit of a rough landing (how could it be anything but rough in those conditions?)  Karen threw me the bow line and I quickly got a couple wraps around the closest piling. Crisis averted!  With the help of another cruiser whose sailboat was tied to the marina docks, the three of us helped Lee and Karen get At Last tied and fendered securely to the dock.

Lee came out of the pilothouse and I shook his hand exclaiming, "YOU SIR, ARE A STEELY-EYED MISSILE MAN!"  Neither he nor Karen ever panicked and they did everything, as a team, 100% correctly, turning a very perilous situation into a happy ending with no damage to At Last or any other boats.  I said, "Lee, I would have been shi**ing!"  He replied, "You haven't seen my pilothouse floor!"

The remainder of the night featured extremely high winds and sideways rain.  I am sure ALL of us were very happy to be tied securely to dock pilings.

So this morning dawned bright and sunny with a bit of a west wind and our plan is to get back onto our original course and head to our moorings at Little Harbour this afternoon.  Chutay is having generator overheating issues and they may stay here in Hope Town to get that issue sorted out.  But the rest of us will be enjoying the hospitality of the Johnston clan at Little Harbour tonight!