Last night, Southern Blue and Wandrian had to make a night entry through the unmarked break in the reef which serves as a channel into the harbor. It was tense, and we tried as much as possible to aid them from the relative comfort of Undaunted's cockpit. We stressed as we heard their conversations on the VHF, there were a few lights from cars driving along the seawall, and from our boats at anchor, which must have been totally confusing to the boats coming in. Add to that, an unlit mooring ball intended for really big ships, and the crazy horsefly looking insects locally called "Doctor Flies" which were attacking all boats near the harbour and you can begin to imagine how unnerving it must have been for them. Fortunately though, the wind and seas were fair so they mostly only needed to focus on not ending up on the reef.
The anchorage was pleasant but the holding was bad, it seemed like there was a miniscule layer of sand over a flat sheet of rock, the boats were holding simply from the weight of their ground tackle and not much else. One of the boats in the harbor (the only one that was there when we arrived) had found an old mooring and had tied up to it. He was lucky to have found it because early that morning he had a squall pass by dumping about 40 kts of wind from the north (precisely the direction that the harbor is exposed to), had he not been tied up, he might have dragged onto the beach with such poor holding.
Anyway, it was a pleasant, albeit buggy night, and I got some good sleep. I woke up to gray skies and a slightly different weather forecast than what I thought we had when we left Nassau. It now seems that we might have some wind from the north-northeast which might make the harbor untennable, so I opted for making a quick run over to Chub Cay about 14 nautical miles away. I discussed this with the captains of the other boats we sailed with while we strolled through town and Undaunted liked the proposition, so we decided to sail over to Chub Cay around 2PM.
We had some squalls all around us most of the way, but luckily we did not run into any of them. One of the squalls even appeared to have a small funnel that never seemed to reach the ocean so that it could reach waterspout status, it was an amazing sight but only from a distance. We reached the anchorage at Chub Cay shortly after 5PM and dropped the hooks in calm water. Clark from Undaunted managed to find a spot with equally poor holding as Morgan's Bluff so he had to reanchor, I found a spot that was reportedly good deep sand (Clark dove on my anchor to check it) and set to work on getting the dinghy off the foredeck.
There isn't much to do here at Chub Cay and the marina has become prohibitively expensive since we last visited (north of $4/foot!!) So we will be waiting on the weather out here.
I'm really dreading the next leg of the trip, it is really long and there are no anchorages on the way... but I suppose that I have no choice but to get it over with (on a good weather forecast).
Hopefully we'll catch up with Southern Blue, Wandrian, and the nameless Catalina in Bimini soon.
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