Left Big Majors at around noon and started an overnight passage to Rum Cay. Things were pretty smooth throughout the day and into the evening, but the winds shifted and increased, and waves picked up as the night wore on. Overcast skies and the moon not appearing until 4:30am made keeping watch pretty nerve-wracking… As soon as I went below deck I was hit with “sea flu” and after that I wasn’t able to get any sleep at all. During the night the chart plotter rebooted itself and sent us wildly off course, so I had to figure out what was wrong and get back on track again. While I was up on deck trying keep watch and not be sick, I was very cold and wrapped up in a blanket and half-asleep when I was hit soundly in the face by a flying fish about 10 inches long. I spent about 3 minutes chasing him around the cockpit trying to get him back into the ocean. Cathy covered a couple of 3 hour shifts through the night. Due to the wind shift, our destination of Rum Cay was going to be un-reachable without motoring. Our next day we were going to head to Clarence Town so we skipped Rum Cay and headed straight to Clarence Town. We arrived in Clarence Town in the morning and collapsed.
After a nap, we started taking stock of how things were going. We came to the conclusion that we were spending lots of time either getting smacked by or dodging storms. Thinking about the long, long passages with which we’d soon be faced along with the increasing isolation and missing our families, we came to the realization that we didn’t want to continue south towards Panama.
When we started this journey, we began from Florida so that we could gain the experience, knowing that at any time, we could decide to end our journey and return home. We had spent more time getting the boat ready in Florida than we had anticipated, so we weren’t going to be able to see much of the Caribbean that we wanted to see, and we’d gotten basically “stuck” in the Bahamas dodging storms. To make it to Panama on time would require us to head straight from the south end of the Bahamas to Panama. As I was reviewing information from several sources I also came to the realization that we would be very pressed for time once we got to the Pacific due to the vast distances that we’d need to cover as we journeyed towards Australia. That meant LOTS of LONG, multi-day passages and less time to spend in the islands like we desired. At this point we decided that we would head back to the states, sell the boat and return home. One of the most difficult decisions we’ve ever had to make, but we’re confident that we’d have more fun if we had a sailboat in the Bay Area or Southern California where we could share our sailing adventures with our friends and family.