Damaged but still floating.

Well, the weather gribs were not exactly spot on (once again) and the wind clocked around one more time, badly fouling us in our anchor chain and carefully placed security lines and then came around much harder from the Northwest again!

Lows are supposed to move clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere but this thing moves counterclockwise or just back and forth from East to North West and never to the South-which is the normal pattern everyone expects when preparing for bad weather here. In Anse Amyot a North West/West wind, puts us on a dangerous lee shore, which is exactly where we are barely holding on right now.

The winds have not let up since this system moved in (maybe we are in the trough of the low, but this is just a guess), so moving has been out of the question, besides, there's nowhere to run to, even if we could.

Pura Vida did her best to hang on over the past two days and had we not run the lines through our bow roller, we would have ended up on the reef right behind us. The fetch built seriously, last night and we were taking six foot waves directly on the nose.

Sometime around 4 am,  in the bucking swell, with our wrapped chain straining us taught on our lines, the bowsprit snapped off. Our dolphin striker looks like a corkscrew, we have rigged our spinnaker halyard though our spinnaker chalk on our forward bowroller, to hold our splintered sprit on the boat.

Jon and I are taking things one step at a time this morning, starting with coffee and as much good humor as we can muster. We've been awake for 48 hours now, so we're gonna try and take it slow...

We consider ourselves lucky, because on a nearby atoll, six houses were obliterated, completely washed away, under three meter waves, last night.

There was no accurate weather warning predicting this unusual weather pattern and it has caught everyone here by surprise.

I'm afraid that's all for now, folks.
Pura Vida, standing by.

2 comments:

  1. Fingers crossed and standing by too.

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  2. standing by as well guys....
    love love and some seriously lightened winds coming your way
    xoxoox

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