Free An Embarrassment of Mangoes by Ann Vanderhoof

experienced cruisers tell us how he saved their bacon for us to ignore his advice. We decide to leave Bimini first thing in the morning.
     
    B y early Sunday afternoon, we’re tied to a dock at Chub Cay, in the Berry Islands group of the Bahamas, at a pricey, protected marina—not the undeveloped, pristine (and free) anchorage where we expected to be staying. At the afternoon check-in, Herb approves our location. But the wind is light, the water a sparkling aquamarine jewel, and the anchorage around the corner—a gentle unprotected indentation in the island’s shoreline—looks like the archetypal Bahamian beach scene of tourism brochures and guidebook covers. “Looks like we could have stayed in the anchorage and saved some money,” Belinda says—
Kairos
is tied to the dock opposite us—and I agree. I’m beginning to doubt the words of the master.
    At 3:30 A . M ., the increased tempo of the spinning blades of the wind generator on
Receta
’s stern wakens us. The wind has started to pick up. By 9 A . M ., boats that spent the night in the anchorage are streaming into the marina with reports of how unpleasant their night had been. Digging out extra lines that we’ve never had to use before, Steve spiderwebs
Receta
between the dock and the pilings, and lashes the sails in place so they can’t unfurl in the wind. To reduce the boat’s windage, we take down the canvas that protects our cockpit from sun and rain. “Put the cushions belowdecks too, and anything else that isn’t tied down,” Steve advises, not doubting Herb’s warning one bit.
    By noon, we have to yell directly into each other’s ears. The wind is grabbing the words out of our mouths and flinging them out to sea. By nightfall, it’s a sandblaster, driving grains from the beach a quarter mile away into our skin, our mouths, our eyes, and through the fine screens that cover the boat’s tightly closed ports. By midnight, the howling is so loud I can’t hear myself think—probably a good thing—and hard metallic sheets of rain are being riveted into
Receta
’s deck.
    Until now, the most wind I’d experienced on a boat was, oh, maybe 25 knots. And I didn’t like it. Steve switches on the boat’s wind-speed indicator; the digital readout climbs to 45 knots—50 miles an hour—but another boat, with a taller mast (and its anemometer higher in the air), is on the radio reporting gusts to 70. I get down our cheery bookshelf friend
The Ocean Almanac
: On the Beaufort Scale, which measures wind velocity, winds of 45 knots are “strong gale,” force 9; winds of 70 knots are force 12, hurricane force, top of the chart—or in Sir Francis Beaufort’s words: “that which no canvas could withstand.”
    For the rest of the night, the wind shrieks through the rigging like a thousand banshees, and
Receta
is heeled over at the dock, straining at her lines, which at midnight Steve had crawled out to double and triple. Welcome to Paradise. It was never like this on the travel posters.
    The next morning, the lone sailboat that had remained in the anchorage limps into the harbor, a piece of its stainless-steel rigging ripped from the deck and dangling like an overcooked noodle. The blades of the boat’s wind generator had been spun off their mount by the relentless wind—a giant, knife-sharp propeller beanie lifted into the air and into the rigging. A Bahamian fishing boat is reported sunk; three of its crew swam safely to shore, but a fourth is missing. The captain of the
Heaven Sent
, a fishing boat safely in the harbor, is asked to go out and search. He refuses, saying he won’t risk the lives of his crew.
    Even boats tied up in the relative protection of the harbor have been damaged: a sail that unfurled and shredded, a canvas bimini top ripped from its supports and snatched skyward, a flipped and punctured dinghy.
    “Hailstones the size of golfballs,” says the captain of another commercial boat that arrives later in the day, while assuring me