After our late night anchoring on the west Turks bank, we went to Southside marina. We had a reservation there to leave the boat for a month while we went home. We had to time our arrival so that we entered the channel to the marina at high tide. Even at that we saw a few spots with only 6 feet of water on the way in. That puts less than a foot under the keel, which seems like very little but is sufficient! Old us would have been freaking out if we ever had less than a foot under the keel in Nova Scotia, but after months in Florida and the Bahamas it seemed fine.
As we approached the marina a man came to the end of the dock and started shouting things we couldn’t understand. Luckily some other sailors came running down the dock shouting, “Mediterranean moor!!”. Well damn, we had read about it but never done it, and now we were about to do it with 1 minute to prepare. Douglas put it in reverse and started to turn, and almost immediately he shouted “we are aground!”! I ran around the boat and back to the depth sounder. “We are not aground, we have 10 feet of water!” I responded. “Well I have no fucking steering!” We went forward and backwards about 6 times, still no control. I was on the stern with a long line that I threw once the boat was closer to the dock. The sailors on the dock grabbed us and manhandled the boat in. I got more lines and then we were given the shore lines to run up to the bow.
Once we had the boat settled we thanked everyone and set out to gather our paperwork for customs and immigration who were now waiting for us inside the marina. I said to Douglas, “What the hell happened?” Doug shook his head, “I have no idea, maybe it was wind or current, maybe it’s because I haven’t docked the boat in a few months, or maybe I just forgot how to back up.” I went up above to tidy up the lines and the cockpit. As I tried to put the wheel in the center to lock it down, I realized that it would only turn about 4 inches in each direction. “Oh honey, we actually don’t have steering!!”
As it turns out, while we were getting beat up by the waves for all those days, a nut was working its way off the autopilot which is directly on top of the component that controls our entire steering system. Thank god it happened where it did or we could have been in serious trouble. Later on that night when we were having drinks with the sailors who helped us in, we told them what happened. The funny thing is that they hadn’t noticed anything was wrong, because apparently everyone who comes in there messes it all up and ends up doing basically what we did even with steering!
We spent a few days exploring the main island of Turks before we flew home for a month. We went downtown, and visited a few restaurants.. It was really pretty and we had a lot of great times hanging out with the two couples that had helped us in. One couple was from Canada and the other from the Southern US. They were all super fun and super experienced sailors. They headed south when we were away but, months later we still touch base with them, and hopefully we will cross paths again.
We left the boat at the marina and flew home for a month in April to deal with the sale of our house in Baddeck. It was bittersweet, and so was going back to the boat. However, while we were in Nova Scotia we got a message from the Nova Scotian couple we had met in the Bahamas, Gwen and Chris. They had just got to Luperon, Dominican Republic and discovered that it is the perfect place to weather out hurricane season. We did a bit of our own research and looking at the short time frame we had to get to Grenada before June first, we decided to also go to Luperon for the hurricane season after Turks.
