Pipe Creek, March 11-14, 2022

           A cold front was fast approaching and we needed to be in a special location when it came.  Normally, the Bahamas have very consistent winds called tradewinds that blow from the east around 15-20 knots.  This is the default pattern if there is no other weather and it is very convenient because the west side of the Exumas are in a relatively shallow wide body of water knows as the Great Bahama Bank.  More or less every island in the chain has a nice sandy bottom where you can anchor and be protected from easterly blowing winds.  Even when these winds pick up and blow more strongly, finding shelter from them is easy.  Cold fronts passing over the Bahamas are a different problem altogether.  They are a common feature of winter and they are surrounded by winds that blow counter-clockwise around the low pressure system.  The winds are often the strongest near the center as the front passes overhead.  This means that as the storm begins, winds blow from the south and they are said to "clock around" blowing steadily from S to SW to W to NW to N to NE.  You might think you could hide on the ocean side of the islands from the strong westerly winds, but that is only a very temporary help, because the winds will soon enough blow around from the east and believe me, you don't want to be on the ocean side when strong winds are coming from the east.  So what you really want is to find a place that is sheltered from as many sides as possible to ride out a storm like this one.

Pipe Creek is an extremely good place to find protection from winds from any direction.

     As you can see from the map, Pipe Creek is pretty much surrounded by land and shallow sandbars,, so it is an awesome place to ride out bad weather.  If you spend some time looking at the map, you might see a small problem with how well protected it is.  The numbers on the chart indicate the depth of the water in meters.  Our boat can pass in waters 1.5 meters deep and if it drops to say 1.3 meters, we will run aground.  Additionally, our stupid-ass depth gauge pretty much surrenders at 3 meters and refuses to read anything more shallow than that.  Our planned approach was to enter at the top left of the map and wind our way down to the bottom center, where you see the little anchor symbol just under the word "intricate" to the right of Little Pipe Cay.  I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to see how often it reads more than 3 meters and how often it gets very close to running aground.  We creeped through the winding path with Lisa out on the bow calling out the color of the water and me very slowly winding my way through the water.  We had done quite well with timing it to arrive at high tide and the sun high in the sky and our skill at "reading the water" got tested very sternly here.  Somehow we managed to wind our way through without hitting the bottom or anyone having a heart attack.  OK, maybe one guy had a heart attack when we passed a little too close to his boat at anchor, but I was reluctant to move far off the line of the map.  Once in a while a very fast speedboat from Staniel Cay would come ripping through and for once I welcomed them, because they generally followed the right line and I could use their path to more accurately visualize what the map was telling me.  There were very long stretches where we had no more than 1 or 2 feet below our keels and it was very rare to have over 4 feet.  The plus side of this shallow water is that we were able to anchor in about 7 feet of water.  Anchors perform best when you have more length of chain dropped in the water.  The basic rule of thumb is that you always want 5 times the water depth in anchor chain, some people say 7 times the depth and in a big storm 10 times the depth is even better.  When you are in 25 feet of water, this can be nearly impossible, because 250 feet of chain would mean that you swing in a circle the length of a football field in every direction from your anchor.  Not only might there not even be that much room without hitting land, it would be nearly impossible for other boats to be anywhere near you.  However, when you are in 7 feet of water, it is no problem to have 70 feet of chain on the bottom.

Pipe Creek sandbar, just off our stern

     Our location couldn't have been better suited to protect us against any kind of weather.  Our anchor held like a champ as the winds rotated around us.  It was actually even overkill because the heart of the storm passed to our north and the winds from the west were never anything serious.  Our first really strong winds were from the north and they were relatively brief.  By morning they had clocked around to the NE, which is pretty typical and there were lots of places that would have been fine for those winds.  It was windy and choppy enough that it wasn't really suitable to explore in the dinghy, but not dangerous or even stressful.  The most exciting bit was when I heard some loud explosions in the early evening and raced to the side to investigate.  It turned out that a neighboring super-yacht was celebrating something, probably being insanely rich, by lighting off a fairly impressive fireworks display.  Shooting off fireworks as a massive storm rolled in reflects a certain confidence or recklessness, but I enjoyed the entertainment whichever.  The sandbar behind us was completely exposed at low tide, where people would wander across and enjoy only to have it submerge again at high tide.  This would be a brilliant spot to post a picture of the guy who was windsurfing and leaping over the sandbar.  Despite the fact that I watched him for an hour or so, I didn't take any pictures.  It was very cool, though.

     I ended up primarily concentrating on projects.  My first goal was to repair the shower drain pump that was doing a better job of putting water in the bilge than in the sea.  It looked like a simple job to remove it.  It was held in place by four screws and attached to an input and output hose with two hose clamps on each side.  There were also two electrical wires, but they were actually quite easy to manage once I figured out how to get into the electrical box.  It seemed to me that I should be able to take it out in 15 minutes or so.  This proved to be a very foolish belief.  The pump is attached to the bottom of the boat and I don't fit in the bilge.  Maybe a small child could, but no adult.  So, you have to squat, sit or kneel and reach down through an open panel to reach the part.  You can try this from behind the part facing the front of the boat, or from in front of the part, facing the back of the boat.  What pretty much all of these positions have in common is that you are uncomfortable and you can only reach 2 or 3 of the various connectors.  Some of them you can reach but not see, some of them you can see but not reach and some of them you can do neither.  I started with the lucky 2 screws that I could both see and reach from a normal seated position and quickly had them unscrewed and sitting in my parts bin.  The next screw, I tried a different kneeling position, a laying position and finally realized that my only hope was to move to the other side and do it facing backwards.  Every fastener from then on presented its own unique contortion to access.  One of the hose clamps could only be reached by unhooking everything else and pulling on the part with one hand while turning the screwdriver with the other once you had stretched out the hose enough to get to it.  I think it took me the better part of two hours to get that stupid pump out and setting on the table so I could try to fix it.  Once I took it apart, it had eaten a lot of hair which had tangled up into a disgusting mass of shampoo, soap, hair and God knows what else.  I pulled the hair free as best I could.  There remained a fair bit of it stuck in the one-way valve, but I feared that I couldn't tug it loose without damaging the valve.  I reassembled the pump and remounted it, poured a bunch of water into the drain and turned on the pump.  It was leaking less water than before, but still leaking a lot more water than one would like.  I decided I needed to take it apart again and deal with the hair around the joker valve.  I took it all apart again and yanked and tugged and teased the hair out.  At one point, I'm pretty sure that I ripped the rubber valve in the process.  Reinstall, retest and now it doesn't seem to be working at all.  On the plus side, it didn't leak.  I removed the part and decided that the loose piece of rubber was clogging the valve so I tried to tug out the loose bit.  The result was that I pulled the entire rubber valve out.  I strongly suspected that this would be the death of the pump, but I had to know.  Reassemble, retest, fail.  By now I had the process of removing or reinstalling the pump down to an art.  I could do it in around 40 minutes now!  I had a spare pump, but it was from a different manufacturer and would require me to find and cut a new length of hose or reroute the existing hose to reduce the length of the loop in the hose, which seemed like a poor idea.  One of our four heads is currently a storage unit for air conditioning parts, so I decided to steal the pump from that one.  By some miracle, this one is mounted on a different bulkhead and you can reach all of the connectors without even moving.  That did indeed only take 15 minutes or so.  The pump from the other shower worked great and I ordered the rebuild kit for the original pump with the new joker valve for the next time I have a sister visiting me who can bring spare parts with her.  My 15 minute job turned out to be probably 10 hours or more over two days, but I had a successful result so I pretended to be happy about it.

Lisa says the blogs are much better with pictures, so here is the rebuild kit for the pump.
The rubber valves are the far left center row.  Exciting, huh?

     Late at night, when the internet was more or less speedy, I started down a rabbit hole of google research on the depth finder issue.  I couldn't figure out how it could have a setting that said "Stop showing depth below 10 feet Y/N" but I thought it couldn't hurt to look.  I should have done this sooner.  Garmin has a support page called something like "Troubleshooting bad depth readings in shallow water."  Hmm, that sounds useful.  It had three things to try.  I climbed over Lisa and went to check out the chart plotter at like 3am.  The first two settings were already set the way Garmin preferred.  The third setting was for the sonar gain.  Garmin suggested setting it to "Auto Low" and mine was set to "Auto High."  Seems worth a shot.  I flipped the setting and went back to the main menu and immediately it cheerfully advised me I was sitting in 7 feet of water.  I didn't think Lisa would be interested in celebrating with me at 3am, so I enjoyed a nice cold Sprite and sat out in the moonlight feeling good about myself.

Nurse Shark circling our boat looking for tasty fish that like our underwater lights.