After leaving our charter guests in Clifton to catch a flight to St Vincent, we had a leisurely sail to Tyrrel Bay, Carriacou under Yankee jib alone. Only one lil squall to 30 knots, not at all unexpected with some sort of tropical system heading our way.
As we had heard, Tyrrel was indeed nearly empty with less than a dozen boats scattered around a bay normally crowded with a hundred or more boats. That sure made it easy to pick a spot to ride out what was soon to be named ts Bret.
Through some odd trick of fate I've been able to get pretty regular weather updates from an internet provider calling itself Moorings 48004 in the Tobago Cays, of all places. I don't know how, especially considering I wasn't using the Bullet or even sitting in the cockpit on my computer.
But the point is, I'd been keeping tabs on ts Bret and had decided that Tyrrel was the place we'd go to weather out this lil blow. We'd be quite safe there even in hurricane force winds, as long as we didn't have any swell, which we wouldn't, if the eye stayed south of us.
Bret has been maintaining an unusually southerly track and with a lot of high pressure to our north, it seems very unlikely that this will change. This will keep the eye well to the south of us and only on the fringe of ts force winds, by my reckoning. Easy peasy, right?
Why then are there something like a hundred boats crammed into the little mangrove lagoon on the north side of the bay, I wondered all afternoon, as we prepared the boat and assembled our #2 anchor, just in case?
"Do all those folks know something I don't?" I asked myself a dozen times as I reran my weather models again and again, now that I had good internet.
Anyway, it is super nice not to have one single boat anywhere about that could possibly drag into us. So far, the highest gust has been 34.4 knots, not even as strong as a squall we had a month or so back, in the Tobago Cays.
But, do all those folks know something I don't?
As we had heard, Tyrrel was indeed nearly empty with less than a dozen boats scattered around a bay normally crowded with a hundred or more boats. That sure made it easy to pick a spot to ride out what was soon to be named ts Bret.
Through some odd trick of fate I've been able to get pretty regular weather updates from an internet provider calling itself Moorings 48004 in the Tobago Cays, of all places. I don't know how, especially considering I wasn't using the Bullet or even sitting in the cockpit on my computer.
But the point is, I'd been keeping tabs on ts Bret and had decided that Tyrrel was the place we'd go to weather out this lil blow. We'd be quite safe there even in hurricane force winds, as long as we didn't have any swell, which we wouldn't, if the eye stayed south of us.
Bret has been maintaining an unusually southerly track and with a lot of high pressure to our north, it seems very unlikely that this will change. This will keep the eye well to the south of us and only on the fringe of ts force winds, by my reckoning. Easy peasy, right?
Why then are there something like a hundred boats crammed into the little mangrove lagoon on the north side of the bay, I wondered all afternoon, as we prepared the boat and assembled our #2 anchor, just in case?
"Do all those folks know something I don't?" I asked myself a dozen times as I reran my weather models again and again, now that I had good internet.
Anyway, it is super nice not to have one single boat anywhere about that could possibly drag into us. So far, the highest gust has been 34.4 knots, not even as strong as a squall we had a month or so back, in the Tobago Cays.
But, do all those folks know something I don't?