Tuesday a new cold front arrived right on schedule, and it wasted no time reminding everyone who’s really in charge. The wind clocked east as forecast, and while the spot I moved to before the last blow doesn’t offer much in the way of protection, it does offer room. Space to swing, room to maneuver, and options if something changes. As the breeze built through the morning, you could feel that low-grade alertness settle in across the anchorage. Radio chatter increased and people warned about boats drifting too close or dragging anchors.

With the chop building, I hauled the dinghy out of the water. I’ve got a simple setup using one of the mizzen halyards to lift it alongside the boat, snug up against the lifelines. It keeps it from getting slammed around when the harbor starts to boil, which it definitely was by then.

As the afternoon went on, the anchorage began re-positioning. Several boats lifted and moved away from the dense cluster anchored off the more popular beaches. There’s always a pull to be close to the action, close to the action and the crowd. But when it’s really blowing that density starts to feel like a liability.

Late Monday evening, a significant solar or electromagnetic storm occured—one of those solar events capable of interfering with satellite systems. At the time, I didn’t think much of it. I had seen a news report mentioning the how visible the aurora borealis lights would be. But as the wind strengthened overnight Tuesday, GPS-based anchor alarms began going off for a lot of people. By morning, posts were showing up in a Bahamas and Caribbean-based Facebook group, sailors scattered across the region all describing the same thing: anchor alarms screaming in the middle of the night even though their boats hadn’t actually gone anywhere.

Mine went off six times. Each alert snapped me awake, heart rate up, only to find that relative to the boats around me, nothing had changed. My visual bearings were steady. The spacing between hulls was the same. What had changed was the GPS data—erratic jumps and sudden position shifts that didn’t line up with wind, current, or any normal swinging pattern. It was noisy data coming in from space, not movement through water.

By mid-morning, as the wind really started to build, that same issue showed up again. On the screen, it looked like we slid about fifty feet. Under normal circumstances that would be an immediate red flag. But once again, it didn’t add up. The swing radius was consistent, and my position relative to neighboring boats hadn’t changed in any meaningful way. The only thing moving was the reported GPS fix itself.

Winds ran in the mid-20s, gusting close to 30, and peaked around 35 later this afternoon before easing overnight. By Wednesday afternoon it was back down in the mid-teens. Until then, it’s very much a “stay put and tend the boat” kind of day.

📝Harbor Notes

Elizabeth Harbor sits remarkably close to the Tropic of Cancer, that invisible line wrapped around the planet at roughly 23.4 degrees north. It’s one of those geographic facts that doesn’t mean much to many. I'm right on the edge of where the sun’s behavior changes, right at a latitude that sailors have paid attention to for centuries.

That proximity got me thinking this week about skills—particularly the older ones. The kind some people might call archaic now, but that were once the difference between finding land and disappearing into the ocean. About five years ago, on a passage to Bermuda, I had my first real introduction to celestial navigation. Enough to understand the concepts, enough to appreciate how powerful it is—but like any perishable skill, it faded quickly without regular practice.

Since then, I’ve sat through webinars, read books, watched plenty of YouTube videos. All useful, but none of that replaces actually doing it. As I start thinking more seriously about longer passages, it’s been nagging at me that this is a skill I want back in my hands, not just in my head. Sitting here in Elizabeth Harbor felt like the right moment to dust it off.

One of the foundational exercises in celestial navigation is the noon sight. It’s deceptively simple: start with your dead reackoned longitude to get local noon, measure the angle of the sun above the horizon at local apparent noon—the exact moment the sun reaches its highest point in the sky. 90 minus that angle tells you the zenith distance between you and the point on Earth directly beneath the sun. Add (or subtract) the Sun's declination found in the nautical almanac, and you end up with your latitude. (In this case, I wasn’t relying on true dead reckoning—I pulled my starting position directly from GPS so I could test the process as cleanly as possible and see if I could get back to the same answer.)

Before reliable radio signals existed onboard ships, this was how oceans were crossed. Sailors from Europe would work their way down the coast of Africa until they reached the latitude of their destination in the Caribbean, then turn west and sail along that parallel. Each clear day, they’d take a noon sight to confirm they were still on the right line. Before accurate time keeping could be taken to sea, longitude was guesswork, but latitude was something you could hold onto.

So this week, I broke out the sextant. First step was figuring out when local noon would actually occur—because noon is almost never at twelve o’clock. Using my known position from GPS (again, cheating a little on purpose), I calculated when the sun would pass directly overhead. For timekeeping, I set my watch using the atomic time signal I receive over SSB radio from Fort Collins, Colorado, so in theory both my position and my clock should have been as accurate as I could reasonably make them.

I took a series of sights starting a few minutes before local apparent noon and continuing a few minutes after, watching for the moment the sun reached its peak in the readings. Then I took the numbers to paper.

I’ll admit, I surprised myself. The math came back clean. The result put me at 23.30 degrees north— exactly where I knew I was. Given the inputs, it’s where I should have ended up, but there was still something deeply satisfying about watching the process close the loop.

It was a small exercise, but a meaningful one. In an age where a blinking screen tells you everything you think you need to know, there’s something grounding about pulling your position out of the sky with your own hands. And in a real pinch, it’s the kind of knowledge that can mean the difference between making landfall and sailing quiet circles under an indifferent sun.