Georgetown!

Finally! After nearly six weeks, we have reached 'chicken harbor', will we become yet another statistic and turn back? Will we continue south as planned? Who knows... All we know is that we are here and some serious weather is headed our way.  Last night we anchored off Stocking Island, but this morning we moved into the redshanks anchorages which offer phenomenal protection from wind and seas from all directions.

We have met up with a few buddy boats already, this place is just absolutely packed with sailboats, I think there are about 300 currently in the harbor... They've kind of formed a community of sorts, where goods and services are exchanged over the radio, and activities are planned and broadcast for all to participate.  This kind of reminds me of the movie 'The Beach', just for a different age group (think AARP).

Anyway, we will be here for a few days and we are moving back to Stocking Island once the weather permits...

Exuma Yacht Club

Elizabeth Harbour

Great Guana Cay - Exumas

We spent a couple of nights at Big Majors Spot, next to Staniel Cay.  So far, Staniel Cay is the most picturesque town we've seen... the small town was clean, most houses were brightly painted, and it had beautiful beaches as well as a nice hill with an awesome view.

I caught a lionfish there, and we had it for dinner... tasty! plus, we were helping the environment!  I did manage to lose my spear tip as part of this whole thing... so that wasn't as sweet.

Anyway, we picked up the anchor in the morning on Saturday, and we sailed towards Black Point at Big Guana Cay.  The wind was a bit stronger than expected and we found ourselves sailing on a close reach at 6kts sustained!  I don't know how Lorena manages to make the boat sail so fast!  Some boats that came in that afternoon reported gusts up to 30kts while sailing... I don't think we had that much wind, but I do think we had about 20kts of wind!

Black Point Settlement is also a very interesting place, for the first time in weeks, we actually see regular people with regular families hanging around... some of the other spots are mostly fishing-oriented and you don't see children or elders... This town has a very strategic harbour and it is very cruiser-friendly, it has several places with free internet, it has free water, free garbage disposal, dinghy dock, etc

Yesterday we spent all day on the boat doing nothing!  The wind was howling and we didn't feel like doing much, so we read, slept, ate, read some more, chatted on the phone, etc... it is nice to not do anything once in a while!

We've seen a couple of boats that we had seen before in different harbours, so it is nice to see some familiar faces around...

Hopefully at some point this week, we will be sailing to Cave Cay, and out into Exuma Sound towards Elizabeth Harbour.  This may be the last spot with good internet before Elizabeth Harbor, so we may not post anything for a few days.

On a different note, the GoPro camera stopped working properly at Staniel Cay, so we put it in a bag full of rice and we are going to try it again today... preliminarily, it seems to be working well... so we haven't been able to post any good pics on this blog.

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...

Atlantis

Our friend Katie came to visit us yesterday, so like most people new to Nassau (including us), she really wanted to go check the aquarium and water park at Atlantis.  We had already inquired about day passes to all this but they were prohibitively expensive, so we did not think we would end up visiting... Anyway, we still walked to Atlantis with Katie in order to find out what other options we might have or whether we did want to part from USD $125 per person to visit these fish and pools... while walking around we ran into Matt from Meant 2B and he mentioned that the marina guests had access to all this stuff for free (as long as you were willing to put up with $4 per foot - 40 foot minimum).  So we inquired at the dockmaster's office and it was indeed as Matt had said.  This meant that us three could visit all this stuff for $160 instead of $375!!!  We all found this to be an acceptable price so we made reservations to come over today and stay for the night.

We walked through the aquarium first and checked out the fish, pretty cool!

Then we went on some rides which were pretty cool too, I hadn't done this sort of stuff in ages.

We have had a couple of boat hiccups today which I hope to be able to resolve tomorrow or on Wednesday... first, our engine took longer to start than usual, and she seems to not like it when I go from idle to full throttle quickly, it will just stall... the second, and less important one, is that the interior lights are acting up... since I haven't been able to find my multimeter, it has been difficult to figure out, it could just be that we are running the battery too low, after all, I have been relying on solar power for a month and we may just be slowly draining the battery... two new things to my mounting pile of TODOs... luckily I have plenty of time to address these things...

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.

Bimini... Finally!

Like any other project in any aspect of life, leaving Miami took longer than anticipated... We had a number of setbacks but most of the real reasons for us not being able to leave sooner were related to procrastination and not having a good plan to tackle all of our pending tasks.

We tried to leave on December 24, 2012 from the Coconut Grove Sailing Club and we initially headed south to Caesar's Creek to get a good angle on the wind and so that we wouldn't have to fight the Gulfstream so much.  We left Coconut Grove around 3PM and got to Caesar's Creek around 9PM, it was a slow but nice sail, a perfect start to our trip!  We anchored near Caesar's Creek and figured we would take a nap, wake up around midnight, go out through the channel and onto Bimini... Due to our misinterpretation of the charts and the fact that we were not familiar with the channel, we ran aground!  We tried all kinds of things to get us off the ground but we were unsuccessful, so we left an anchor out and went back to sleep... Around 4:30AM we were off the ground thanks to the tide and we were too tired to try to leave at that point, so we anchored in deeper water and went back to sleep.  We missed our weather window.  Have you ever heard about 'Never enter a strange harbor at night'? I guess I took it too literally, even though I knew about this, I somehow did not apply this principle to leaving a strange harbor at night... anyway, we learned our lesson, hopefully we won't make the same mistake again!

We spent the next few days anchored in No Name Harbor waiting for the weather to be just right, but it wasn't until the night of Tuesday, January 1, 2013 that we were able to get a good window again.  We said goodbye to some friends again and we left the Coconut Grove Sailing Club at 8:30PM that night.

We motored across Biscayne Bay in a calm, out to the open ocean through the channel just south of Cape Florida, and initially towards Fowey Rocks Lighthouse in order to not have to fight the Gulfstream too much while going east to Bimini.  I originally thought that we would be able to sail across the Gulfstream, but the wind didn't seem to be coming from the south enough for me to do that, I did try it for about half an hour to an hour, most of that time was spend going mostly north and loosing ground... We reached Bimini at 12:00PM on Wednesday after motoring for almost 15.5 hours, that was a bit longer than I expected!

We will be hanging out in Bimini until the weather looks favorable for a run across the banks hopefully to the Northwest channel light, then to Chubb Cay or Nassau.  The weather doesn't look like it will make this leg of the trip easy anytime soon so we will be hanging out here for a while.

We are currently docked at Brown's Marina, the staff is excellent and we have been very pleased with their service, I recommend it.  There are a number of smaller sailboats here, some of them are planning on going on in the same general direction so we will try to tag along.

We went fishing a couple of days ago and caught several fish, I might try my luck at spearfishing later on and hopefully I'll catch something reasonable...

Wish us luck!

PS:  There are plenty of sharks in this harbor, Lorena was going to step onto the boat from the dock and while she was looking down she saw a 10 foot shark (probably a bull shark!), then while talking about that the next day we say a few more right off the dock!  Note to self: no swimming after dark!