Chub Cay, an idyllic anchorage... maybe

Last night was awesome.  The wind was calm and the anchorage was dead flat.  The skies cleared and the moon was casting our shadow on the sandy bottom below.  The water was so clear that I could see the individual strands of seagrass and starfish in the boat's moonshadow, now imagine how clear it was in the moonlight.  As opposed to Andros, I've seen no bugs besides the ones that managed to catch a free ride on the boat... it cost them dearly though when they tried to bite me at night!

Dawn brought to my eyes one of the most idyllic scenes so far during this trip.  The clear glassy water lay interrupted only by the nearby islands and by Undaunted.  The morning was also very silent except for some seagulls scavenging on the beach under the high tide line, in the distance I could also faintly hear the rumbles of the generators that power the failed project also known as Chub Cay Marina.  I made myself some breakfast and once I finished, I could not tolerate the tower of dirty dishes so I went to work on cleaning them up.  I am philosophically opposed to any kind of activity that can be labeled as work, but I suppose it is the price one pays to enjoy yet another day in paradise.

I went for a swim around noon to manually reset my anchor into a safer direction in anticipation of the late afternoon northeasterlies being predicted by the different weather sources.  I also swam over to Undaunted and chatted with them for a while.  Then I spent some time cleaning the hull from all the nasty spilt fuel that inevitavely flows by your boat at the Nassau harbour.  I then grabbed the spear and went for yet another unsuccessful hunt.  I did see lots of fish and an easy lobster (but they are out of season).  As I swam on the edge of the abyss leading to the depths of the Tongue of the Ocean during flood tide, I could feel the rich cold water flooding the banks.  I managed to partially spear a good sized grunt but the barbs didn't go in deep enough and it managed to swim away.  Shortly thereafter, and at the same time, a 6-foot nurseshark and a barracuda swam over and paid me a visit... this spooked me enough to call it a day.

I swam back to the boat and started to prepare food for tomorrow's passage.  I had some lunch and now have a new pile of dirty dishes!

The wind picked up around 5:30PM and the anchorage doesn't seem as idyllic anymore.  I am a bit concerned about how my friends at Morgan's Bluff are dealing with this, hopefully the wind will turn sufficiently east such that the anchorage remains tennable.

Tomorrow, if everything stays as planned, I will be heading out across the banks for an overnight run down to Bimini.  I may end up anchoring somewhere in the middle of the featureless banks if conditions permit.

Morgan's Bluff and Chub Cay

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.

Seas the Moment reaches Nassau

We spent about 5 nights at Chub Cay, two of them at the pricey marina, three of them anchored out in a couple of nearby spots.  There isn't much to do in that little island, so we did plenty of reading, walking, sleeping, etc...

I was a bit upset when I wrote my previous post about Chub Cay (and it shows in the tone and mood of my comments), but after a couple of days I finally understood why such an expensive place offers so little services to the cruising sailor.  In short, the project to renovate the whole club seems to have gone a bit bankrupt, and we don't represent their core business, so they don't cater to us much... we met some friendly and interesting people there, and we had a good time while doing nothing... we met a fisherman named Dave who sold us snappers for $1!!! We met a singlehander named Jerry who had small 27 footer and was just cruising on $500/month! We met another singlehander named Dave who was sailing a 31 foot catamaran and had done this trip about ten times already!  Anyway, there was not much to do in Chub Cay and we wanted to move on, so as soon as the weather cleared up, we weighed anchor and set course for Nassau.

Our trip to Nassau started rather eventful, our navigation lights did not work!  I was not going to head back just for that, so I managed to jury-rig some nav lights with some broken portable ones I had from a previous boat, a flashlight, and some duct tape!

The weather was calm and the light breeze was on the nose at first, but as the morning sun rose, the wind started shifting to the north just a bit (exactly the opposite of what the weather forecast mentioned) and I was able to motorsail most of the way to Nassau!

As soon as we reached Nassau we saw Dave from Miou (pronounced like the noise cats make) the catamaran, he had left after us, and passed us at night, having reached Nassau about an hour or two before us.  As soon as we saw Miou, we heard Spice hailing us on the VHF!  Dan (from Spice) had speculated that we should be reaching the harbor around that time and was trying to find out if we had arrived, he must be some sort of psychic.  We sailed into Nassau Harbor and right through the cruise ship docks into the Harbour View Marina where Spice and another boat we met in Bimini were staying.

We have been spending plenty of time walking around town, visiting some interesting spots, and procrastinating on boat projects... We will probably be staying for a week or so around here... then on to the Exumas.

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.