The next morning looked at least as good, and the weather forecast showed increased clearing between the squalls, so on we went. Our next stop was Spanish Cay, the first civilization we would hit since West End five days before. It's a private island with a little resort and even a small airstrip.
On the way there we were lucky to only hit the edge of a very large squall. A boat behind us said on the VHF it went on for at least five miles. The trail of storms continued all the way towards Florida.
We got there pretty early and the marina was empty, but by dark it was almost full. That should have set off some alarm bells. In retrospect I was a little too casual setting up the dock lines. When I asked to get wifi they cautioned me that it was satellite and didn't work well with the bad weather, so I declined. We had a nice little dinner at the marina restaurant.
Late that night all hell broke loose. The breakwater wasn't solid and waves were just plowing right over it, slamming into our fairly flat stern. Then some really impressive winds hit, stretching one of our spring lines at least a couple feet so our anchor was actually hitting the dock, which in turn was kicking up the cover for the anchor well with a bang that sounded like a gunshot. It took us a few minutes to figure this all out in the wind and the rain and the dark. It took all my (substantial) weight to pull the spring line in a couple feet and get us off the dock.
Even with us not hitting the dock the waves kept slapping our stern all night. In the morning we noticed that all of the powerboats, and most of the sailboats, had docked stern in, so their bow was facing more toward the entrance and the breakwater.
At some point during the night the power on the boat went out, but I no longer really cared. In the morning we found out it wasn't just us. One of the island generators had blown during the storm. In the morning I also saw that our anchor had chewed about six inches off the end of one of the dock planks. Oops. The anchor and the rest of the boat looked fine once I brushed the chunks of wood off.
Next time we had wifi I noticed that a late weather supplement email had come in earlier that evening at Spanish Cay, a few hours before the storm had hit, because conditions had worsened, potentially forming some pretty explosive storm cells with winds of up to 70 knots. That would have been good to know. I don't think we got hit with the full extent of that, but it was similar or even a little worse than the 50 knot storm we had seen at the dock in New Orleans last year. We need to keep working on our weather source(s) when away from the states.
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