Exumas

After 15 long days we finally left Nassau Harbour.  Nassau is a very nice place, and we had a good time, but we really wanted to move on.  We had a great time with Bill, Regina, and Matt from Meant 2B, and we met some other interesting characters along the way, but we needed go...

On Tuesday, Jan 5, we left Nassau in the morning around 8:30 and we anchored in the lee of Highbourne Cay around 4PM.  It was an awesome sail, at first, we were motorsailing since it was a bit to close to the wind to sail, but after some time, the wind shifted just enough for us to sail close-hauled engineless!  the wind was light, about 11-15 kts, and we were doing about 5+ kts! for some reason not normal to our boat, we were going faster than all the boats in our vicinity (about 4 boats, all of them longer) and we soon left them behind...

Some time after having anchored, Quiet Time anchored next to us, we had met one of the crew in Nassau so we hung out for some drinks on our boat.

Since the weather was holding up, the next morning we decided to weigh anchor and continue south towards Warderick Wells, we picked up a mooring there, and stayed for the night.

The next morning the weather was still cooperating so we decided to leave the mooring and head for Staniel Cay... we motorsailed most of the time given that the wind was on our nose and we needed to make long tacks... anyway, we anchored in Big Majors Spot, fed the pigs, explored the beach, went over to Staniel Cay, rescued a loose dinghy, etc... we might stay in this anchorage for a couple of days...

We also saw Moonshadow, a boat that we met in Key Biscayne, then in Bimini, and now in Big Majors Spot...

A front is expected to come through this weekend and the area around Staniel Cay and Big Majors Spot seems to offer a number of anchorages for the clocking winds, so we will see how long it takes us to check out of this spot...

By the way, the last couple of posts have been written from the boat at anchor while sharing the 3G data connection from my phone (thanks Olga!) with a hotspot application... if/when I get real WIFI, I will add a post with some videos...

Crossing the banks and Chub Cay

This afternoon we finally reached Chub Cay (pronounced chub key), this is about 80 miles from Bimini... most of it directly against the prevailing seas and winds...

We had waited for a "weather window" in Bimini for about 12 days and I suppose we were getting a bit anxious to leave, Bimini is a nice place and Browns Marina is very cool and affordable but we wanted to see some more progress...

We left Bimini on Sunday afternoon and "staged" ourselves on the west side of Bimini (protected from the prevailing winds) so that we could save some time on the whole passage.  We left our weighed anchor around 4:15 AM on Monday and started navigating by GPS until we rounded a rock on the north end of Bimini which also is supposed to have a light (doesn't work) and headed east towards the northern end of the Mackie Shoals on the Great Bahama Bank (a huge stretch of shallow featureless sea mostly about 20 feet deep), we had probably something between 15-20 knots on the nose the whole time, the chop built up about two feet, often in a particular wavelength that simply stopped my boats progress to about 2 knots... I only carry about 14 gallons of gas on my boat so I was a bit concerned from the start about our range... I ended up using about 10 gallons the whole way, and that is because I decided to go slower than our friends on Spice and Chevere which could do better speed.

The trip has the following four waypoints: North Rock (Bimini), Mackie Shoals (Great Bahama Bank), Northwest Channel light (Banks), and Chub Cay (Berry Islands).  We couldn't make all of them in one shot so we decided to anchor for the night near the Northwest Channel light.  This was the right thing to do because we were exhausted, we could not see anything (7:00PM on a moonless night), and we didn't want to end up on the reefs near the channel that leads the bank's water into the Northwest Channel.  However, this decision of anchoring on the banks lead to the WORST night I've ever spent at anchor... we had sloppy, iregular, two-foot chop, we were near a highly transited channel, it was pitch black, our boat was rocking and rolling very bad, and everything onboard had this saltwater mist that makes everything permanently damp... The wind also picked up during the night and made the chop worse, I was even considering weighing anchor and going back to Bimini (which most likely would have ended this whole trip)... The next morning the wind started to settle down to about 10-15 knots, it also shifted a bit and made our leg to the Northwest Channel partially under sail, and then, from then on, once on the Northwest Channel, we were able to sail in deep water with longer period waves which did not stop us as much for a while... until we got anxious to get to Chub Key and rest.

Chub Key is an expensive private marina that is most likely not interested in having non-members rent fees for a few days... the service is poor, the amenities available to us non-members are very sub-standard, and I now understand why I rarely see cruisers recommend it... anyway, after such an awful night, we feel great to be tied up to a dock and not have to rock like crazy on heavy chop.

We will now be waiting for a new weather window to go to Nassau, some of the boats that left on Sunday from Brown's Marina in Bimini are already on their way there.