Cave Cay to Black Point

The weather was predicted to be light, around 13 knots... And it was at first... I was able to have a nice sail with a full rig up for a while, but then the wind picked up a bit and the boat was flying!  For a while there, I was doing sustained 6.4 knots, even going up to 6.7 a few times!  My boat, however, is not really designed to do more than 6.3 kts, so I decided to reduce sail and still was able to stay between 5.5 - 6.2 knots! This was more comfortable and still fast enough for me... It was a sweet sail and now I am peacefully anchored at Black Point, one of my favorite spots in the Exumas.

Georgetown to Cave Cay - singlehanded

Today was my first truly singlehanded passage.  It was not very long, only about 35 nautical miles, but it was good!

I raised anchor at Georgetown at about 7:00AM, and started making my way northwest through the Elizabeth Harbor.  This time I chose to deviate from the recommended Explorer Charts' tracks, instead, I simply cut through wherever I felt was deep enough.  I might not have done this before, with Lorena onboard, but now I am the only person onboard to suffer from my mistakes so I have a bit more leeway to explore.

I made it out of the harbor around 8:00AM and started heading northwest towards the Cave Cay cut.  The winds were supposed to be coming from the north in the morning and gradually clocking to the northeast through the day.  My observation was that the wind was from the north-northwest, preventing me from sailing straight to my destination.  Instead, I was forced to sail (motorsail to be honest) west-northwest, then motor straight north, then go back to sailing west-northwest, you get the picture...  At around 2PM the winds did finally clock around enough for me to just sail straight!

The ocean (Exuma Sound) was calm with an odd swell coming from the east-southeast which graciously propelled my towarda my destination.  Occasionally I noticed some sets in the swella which were disproportionately bigger than the rest.  The thought of getting one of of these sets while going through the cut concerned me.  When waves hit opposing currents such as in this cut, they become steep, and sometimes break.  However, I managed to slowly make my way through the cut and did not observe any breakers.  My engine was throttled about halfway and the sails were full, but the ebbing current in the cut was so strong that I speculate I was only doing about one knot of speed over the ground!

Once inside, the motion of my boat eagerly welcomed the nice, clear, calm waters of the Exuma Bank.  Soon thereafter, I anchored in calm water on the lee of Cave Cay.

Going through this cut brought to my mind the engineless sailors out there.  In a case like today, an engineless boat would have to wait until slack tide at 8:00PM or so, and then make it through the cut.  These people are my heroes, I wouldn't have the patience to do that unless in the case of an emergency, and then I would be breaking the classic rule "don't enter strange harbors at night".

It looks like tomorrow and thursday are going to be good days to sail, but probably not so on friday and saturday... So I'll have to plan to be anchored somewhere protected on thursday.  According to Dan from Spice, who listened to Chris Parker on the SSB this morning, this coming front may bring some nasty squalls with heavy winds, so that makes the need for a good anchorage even greater.