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may 2016cruisingworld.comSPECIAL REPORTSomething to keep an eye on, Ken thought,
but nothing to cause alarm.
In the hours before dark, the sky didn’t
look too unusual. “There was something
going on there, but it wasn’t something
obvious,” he says.
Parker says that in the days preceding
the storm, his best-guess forecast called
for winds out of the south and west with “a
few squalls of 45 to 50 knots.”
That’s a possibility that Peter Malloy
and his wife, Mary, at Staniel Cay (not far
from the Barths), say they were prepared
for. “We were expecting squally weather,”
Peter says. Even so, what approached them
at about 1800 that day “looked no dif erentthan an ordinary squall.”
It wasn’t until the following day that
cruisers learned from Parker that they
might have experienced a derecho — a rare
self-sustaining storm of intense straight-
line winds (rather than circular, as in a
tornado) that blow perpendicular to the
motion of the system. A distinctive shelf
cloud often marks the approach of a dere-
cho. But even now, Parker isn’t certain
that’s what it was.
“I can’t say for sure,” he says, but he
notes that it seems to have “met all the cri-
teria” to be defi ned as such.
One thing that Parker can say
defi nitively is that in his 13 years offorecasting the weather in the Bahamas
and Caribbean, he’d never seen a weather
event like this one. The low that produced
the system also spawned Alex, a highly
unusual January hurricane, the fi rst of the
2016 season.
For the Pimentels, three-year veterans of
cruising in the region, the wind gradually
increased from 20 to 40 knots, accompa-
nied by a wind-driven four- to fi ve-foot
chop that pulsed through their anchor-age. Ken started Dream Catcher’s engines
and began powering into the waves, hop-
ing to stay anchored and steer clear of
other boats that had already begun to
drag. During one particularly strong gust,
a monohull went beam to and suddenly
began making sternway.
“That boat was coming toward us,” Ken
says. “I couldn’t get to my anchor because
he was right over it.”
A trawler grounded on the sandbar next
to the narrow channel. More chillingly,
Channel 16 crackled with a Mayday from
Highbourne Cay, just north of Norman’s
Cay. “A woman came on and she was fran-
tic,” Ken says. She could barely explain
that the engine on her and her husband’s
26 -foot sloop would not start, and that
they were about to go on the rocks. A
nearby marina was able to dispatch a boat
that made a harrowing rescue of the cou-
ple as their tiny sloop was left to drift away.
Discovered a few days later, Rum Belly was
described by the skipper who found it as
little more than a debris fi eld scattered on
an adjacent cay.
“The radio was alive,” says Bob Kennell.
“You could hear so many anxious moments
from sailors who had their own problems
to deal with.” Amid his family’s own con-
cerns, he admits, the VHF became mostly
an unwelcome distraction.
By the time things started to settle
down for Dream Catcher, which had man-
aged to stay put and avoid everyone else,
things were just beginning for the Kennells
aboard Arapesh and for dozens of other
cruisers at Big Major’s and Staniel Cay. At
those locations, darkness and torrential
rain were added to the mix.
Arapesh was pulling hard at her rode
within a few hundred feet of the razor-
sharp rocks that litter the Exumas. Like
nearly everyone else battling the storm,SCHOOL OF HARD
KNOCKS
For the full derecho Q&A with
Marine Weather Center forecaster
Chris Parker, and to read the les-
sons the Bahamas’ sailors learned
from their derecho experience, go to
cruisingworld.com/1605derecho.