Slow Boat to the Bahamas by Linus Wilson

Author:Linus Wilson [Wilson, Linus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxriver Publishing
Published: 2015-11-27T22:00:00+00:00

28. High Times at Highbourne Cay

I was expecting a motor through calms and shifty winds, which would be mostly behind us. Instead, we were motoring into the two-foot seas and 10-knot sustained breezes. We left the dock at 7:30 AM but by 8:20 AM Janna was complaining of sea sickness and emerged from the cabin. Soon after Sophie, who had been on a sailboat since she was six weeks old, came down with the second bout of seasickness of her life. One minute she was carefully coloring a page in her My Little Pony coloring book. The next she was puking and only quick movements kept the log book and her coloring book from being ruined. I scrambled to clean up the mess with water and hid the smelly paper towels in a trash bag under the dinghy in the bow. This was not exactly the gentle introduction to the cruise that I had hoped for!

I was not able to get hold of our destination marina at Highbourne Cay over the cell phone before we were out of range. I did successfully hail it over VHF channel 71 from about 20 miles away. The operator asked me to call back when I got closer since she had more trouble hearing me than I had hearing her.

By noon both Janna and Sophie felt well enough after avoiding the cabin to start eating. Janna benefited from the Scopalamine patch, but the seasickness medicines were not dosed or recommended for kids and the resident pediatrician, Janna, thought it best to not give her anything. I thought the conditions were mild and took nothing. We put up the second reef and unfurled the genoa to 75% of the fore-triangle, but the wind angles sometimes necessitated that we furl it.

My five previous attempts to call the dock master failed, but Janna showed me his card. She got it when he let us use the courtesy car. My e-mail went through and our long stay at Palm Cay ended up costing less than half of what I had paid to Paradise Harbor Club. The dockmaster called me at 6:30 PM to take my credit card details.

As we approached Highbourne, we looked at it through the binoculars, and I snapped an adorable picture of Sophie in her pink baseball cap, raincoat, and life jacket. In the picture, she peered intently through the binoculars or “spyglasses” as she liked to call them off to the stern but Highbourne lay off the bow.

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