On New Years Day 2000, the first day of the new millennium, Don Fairweather, a Canadian single-hander, left Nassau, Bahamas. He stopped off at Normans Cay, about 30 miles southeast of Nassau, where he helped a couple of snorklers who were having trouble with their dinghy motor. He told them he couldn’t stop to chat because he wanted to get to his next anchorage before nightfall.
He hasn’t been seen since.
We spent that New Year’s Day, and the two days after it, anchored at Hawksbill Cay, a couple of miles south of Normans Cay. Then we headed slowly south to Georgetown via Staniel Cay and several other anchorages. We didn’t encounter Don and Intrigue, his 32’ sloop, anywhere along our route.
The boat has never been found, no wreckage has turned up and Don’s EPIRB was never activated.
Laura Fairweather, the younger of Don’s two daughters, flew down to the Bahamas to search for him after all the local efforts to find him failed. She’s convinced he took the cay-hopping inside passage down the Exuma Cays, intending to anchor each night, but I can’t believe that; no-one saw him and it’s a fairly well traveled road at that time of the year. My guess is that he cut through the chain of cays south of Normans Cay to Little San Salvador and then went offshore towards his ultimate destination which, I believe, was the British Virgin Islands.
The weather was pretty benign until 14 January when a strong ‘norther’ came through with winds gusting to 40 knots or so. He would have been long gone by then so it seems unlikely that he succumbed to a weather event. Piracy was unheard of in the Bahamas at that time so that leaves a run-down or other catastrophic event leading to sinking, or he fell over the side. If he was offshore when such a tragedy occurred it wouldn’t be certain that the boat would be found, if left to drift on its own, or that any debris would wash up on an inhabited shore. That’s why I think he went offshore – you couldn’t hide a boat wreck on the inside passage even if he had managed to travel it unnoticed. He was a highly experienced mariner for whom the offshore option would not have been daunting, perhaps even preferred.
It was suggested that he may have wanted to drop out and start a new life but that’s a non-starter – he was by all accounts a contented, fit and healthy 70 year old, long divorced, financially well-off and devoted to his two daughters.
I guess we’ll never know what became of Don Fairweather and Intrigue. And maybe ocean cruising is just that little bit more hazardous than I like to believe.
