Tripppin In The Bahamas – Snap Crackle Pop

A continuation from my earlier post, http://wp.me/pKtoE-af.

The trusty ACR ditch bag, that stays full of gear, and our ACR EPIRB.

Ok, so that part where the lighting was nonexistent lasted about two more minutes. The seas were now solid 4-5 footers, the rain kicked up along with the wind, and the lightning was popping off in the distance. Any boater will tell you that this is one of the worst feelings you can have when you’re 50 miles offshore with other people’s lives in your hands. I looked at my Dad, who until this point had remained calm and collected. He was now dawning a spiffy green poncho, his Costas and a miserable smirk across his face. I looked at him and said, “What do I do?” because I honestly had no idea other than to turn around. His answer was a myriad of questions like, “How large is the storm?”, “How far do we have left?”, and “What do you think?”. I looked at him and said, “I have no freaking idea…I’m trying to keep us floating, and we’re still 20 miles from West End!” He slid in next to me, pulled up the weather chart and the sonar on our Garmin systems, laid it over the GPS maps to show us exactly how large the storm was, and what we were looking at. Just another reminder that my Dad knows a lot about a lot, and just as soon as I think I’ve got him beat with modern technology, I don’t. Fantastic, we could finally see what we were dealing with. The bad news was that we’d spent about an hour trying to get around a storm the size of New York. I backed down off the throttles, as it was apparent we weren’t out running anything. I looked at the weary, cold, wet crew and said, “What do you guys want to do?” We took a group vote, and after a spirited four-minute debate we decided to punch through it. We made sure the ditch bag, jackets and safety equipment were ready should we need them, and we all hunkered down for a knee-jarring, ass-kicking ride through the dark clouds in front of us.

The waves were pretty gnarly and the rain made it almost impossible for anyone to hide from that miserable sting. We pushed our way through the worst of it for 10 minutes, trying everything from plowing into the waves and running over them at 35knots. Nothing seemed to make it better. That was until we made it inside the storm. Once we broke the outer side of the thunderhead we were greeted with an eerie flat sea with almost no wind or rain. I wasn’t going to stick around and count my blessings, so we put Tripppin on the pins and made the final push at 50+ knots. Once on the other side of the storm we were greeted with sunlight, blue sky and flat seas. It wasn’t long until we saw the beautiful water tower on the tip of West End letting us know we’d made it to the Bahamas.

Sorry for the lack of photos in this post. We weren’t concerned with the cameras during this particular part of the trip. I promise to make it up to you with an awesome video on the next post.

You can find the next part of the journey here, http://wp.me/pKtoE-b1.