We left ourselves ten days to get from Eluthera to Georgetown, a distance of 80 miles as the crow flies, considerably further as the boat sails.

Now here’s the thing about a sailboat—you can’t sail directly into the wind. Some boats can get pretty close to the wind. But not our boat. Twenty tons of steel, remember?

The trade winds were just setting in on the first leg, southwest from Eluthera across the Exuma Sound. Deep blue water, over 5,000 feet in the middle of the sound, sunshine, a brisk southeast wind. Perfect. We passed a sport fishing boat bobbing in the deep water.

“Look,” a man shouted. He held up a four-foot tuna, grinning. The man, not the fish. Chris immediately put out our line, and within minutes something big seized his new red plastic squid. Then ran off with it.

“My new squid!!!” Chris put out his second-best squid, but we didn’t have another nibble the whole way across.

We made landfall at Highbourne Cay, got a good night’s sleep, then turned our bow… southeast. Right into the wind, which had built overnight and kept building. By midday we were pounding into steep choppy waves, salt spray drenching the boat, flying in through the cockpit windows from time to time.

“This is stupid,” Chris said, wiping his sunglasses. “And we’re not making much headway. Let’s try again tomorrow.”

We tacked our way into Hawksbill Cay, a shallow anchorage far from shore but more or less sheltered from the southeast.

The next day was no better. The winds, if anything, were building. The trade winds had well and truly set in. We turned and ran north. With the wind at our back, it was a beautiful downwind sail. We decided to carry on past Hawksbill to Shroud Cay, which has slightly better protection from the south.

Distance made good, minus three miles, I wrote in the log book.

We didn’t even try the next day. We watched what was going on out on the banks—lots of boats heading north; only a foolhardy few heading south, hobbyhorsing wildly through the whitecaps. Instead we explored the coast of the uninhabited island in our dinghy, found a huge ray loafing in a pool on the tidal flats, discovered some very strange mud mounds—who lives here, I wondered, stepping carefully around them. I didn’t really want to find out.

A couple days later, we tried again. Same thing. This time we turned and ran north all the way to Highbourne Cay (distance made good: minus 10 miles) so we could access the internet, get a long-range weather forecast. And let our friends, who were flying into Georgetown, know that we wouldn’t be there.

They’ve rebooked their flight, and will meet us in Staniel Cay in a few days, a mere 40 miles south of Highbourne, as that proverbial crow flies. The trade winds are finally easing a little. We’ll try again this morning, tacking all the way.

We’re older now, sure, but still running against the wind.