Great Sale on weather

We are anchored in the "North West Harbour" of Great Sale Cay, which is actually to the southwest of the cay (map). This is a very protected anchorage for winds out of the north or east, and even though it was blowing ten to fifteen out of the south when we arrived Thursday afternoon, the winds clocked around after dark and it was nearly glass calm here overnight. We dropped the tender and had a very nice steak dinner aboard Blossom.

By mid-day yesterday the first part of this storm system had already moved in, and we decked the tender before the winds got too high. Three more boats joined our two here just at dark, and I expected they'd be riding out the storm with us here until Monday. We were all surprised to see them leave this morning; later we heard them on the radio plowing into it and looking for shelter.

Great Sale is completely uninhabited, and the four of us are again alone here. (Correction: as I was typing, a sailboat motored in, looking a bit uncomfortable. He's anchoring now.) I had figured to be off-line here, too, as we are quite far from the nearest tower, but we're getting a high-speed connection courtesy of our cellular amplifier and mast-mounted antenna. It turns out this amp works better here than on the frequencies we commonly use back in the states.

We do need to be careful -- we've already blown through a quarter of our 2gb of pre-paid data in just three days. In addition to downloading our email and researching routes and stops moving forward from here, I also went back and cleaned up my last post, adding map links to our anchorages and a few photos from our first two stops. It's too windy now to get a decent shot here for this post, but I'll try to snap one before we leave.

Winds now are around 20 knots steady, and we're expecting 30 before the storm is through with us. At this writing we expect to be pinned down here tomorrow as well, with a plan to depart first thing Monday morning, in the direction of Green Turtle Cay.