On Tuesday, June 3rd, we left Marsh Harbour for Tahiti Beach, which is located on the southern end of Elbow Cay. Tahiti Beach is one of the neatest beaches we've seen - it only appears at low tide and completely disappears at high tide. We spent a few hours on the beach, then spent some time snorkelling around the boat to clean barnacles and other sea life off the bottom.
The following day was hot and sunny day again as we sailed and motored south to Little Harbour on Great Abaco Island. We tried to put up the stay sail to add a bit more speed today. We had not put this sail up before. It turns out that our stay sail doesn't fit the current rigging on the boat. The last owner broke the original mast on Geru and had a new one made. It appears that when this was done, the attachment point of the inner stay to the mast was moved. Since the staysail predates this modification, it no longer fits - it is too big! So...sometime we will need to get that sail recut.
Little Harbour has a neat little foundry and gallery of cast bronze sculptures (along with other local art), which we visited on our second day there. We had also heard of a nearby beach that is supposed to be full of beach glass (which are shards of glass, often old, that have been smoothed by being tumbled in the surf and rocks). The beach was a mixture of sandy sections and ledges of sharp old rocky coral. We did find some glass, although we'd expected to find larger pieces. One afternoon we walked up to the lighthouse. Today the lighthouse is an electric light on a tall post that apparently works "sometimes". The post sits next to the ruins of the old lighthouse. This was the first time in our travels through the Bahamas (but not the last) that it struck us how harsh life here must have been before the advent of regular food and goods shipments from the outside. It's very barren, there's little soil to grow anthing, and the only fresh water in most places is from the occasional rain. Today many towns have reverse-osmosis watermaking plants that produce fresh water from sea water on a large scale, but most houses also still have cisterns to catch rain falling onto the roofs.
Our next stop after Little Harbour was the island of Eleuthera. The trip from the Abacos to Eleuthera takes a full day over open ocean. This was only our second passage like that - the first being our Gulfstream crossing. We had wanted to leave Little Harbour and head for Eleuthera on Friday. However, the weather didn't allow for it as the wind was blowing right against us and the seas were on the large side. The weather looked more favourable for Sunday. We were faced with a bit of a dilemma, though. The entrance to Little Harbour is a little too shallow for us (and we only draw three feet!) at low tide, which was right when we needed to leave on Sunday morning in order to make our passage in daylight. So on Saturday, we moved half an hour north of Little Harbour to Lynyard Cay in preparation for our sail to Eleuthera.
Tahiti Beach
Little Harbour Gallery
Beach on the Atlantic side of Little Harbour
Little Harbour (view from up the mast)
Pete's Pub in Little Harbour
