To the Exumas via Eleuthera

22 June 2008

On Sunday, June 8th, we motored to Eleuthera and anchored at Royal Island. We had planned on sailing across, but shortly after leaving the cut to the ocean Geoff got quite seasick. There were some fairly large swells (about five feet). We ended up motoring, because it would have been more of a challenge for Ruth to handle the sails alone while also looking after Geoff. Geoff was finally able to get enough Gravol in so that by the time we arrived he was feeling almost normal. Other than the swells, it was actually quite a nice day for our trip to Eleuthera.

We spent Monday at Royal Island for Geoff to recover and install the watermaker (it now works!). Outside of another boat on the other side of the anchorage, we were alone in a large and almost completely enclosed bay. The statement of the day by Ruth was "What a wonderful Monday.... everyone's at work - and we are here!" It certainly didn't feel like a Monday at Royal Island. We are finding that we frequently lose track of the days of the week.

On Tuesday we motored to the northernmost islands of the Exumas chain. We had been hearing since Florida that the Exumas are wonderful. The water is very clear here, so clear that you can see the bottom 20 feet down even with just the moonlight. But the rest of the landscape is very barren and scrubby - not the tropical paradise we expected. We are begining to think many people like the Exumas because during the crusing season (which is over the winter) it is not as crowded as the Abacos.

Over the next ten days, we slowly worked our way down the Exumas island chain. We spent a day at Warderick Wells in the Land and Sea Park for our first real snokeling of the trip. We saw some nice coral and tropical fish. On Sunday we anchored off Big Majors Spot. The cay is famous for the pigs that residents of a neighboring island keep here. The pigs roam freely and are fed by cruisers arriving on boats. We took the dinghy into the beach, and the sound of our outboard engine brought a large pig running towards us out of the shrubs! We brought some cut-up potatoes and got to feed and pet the pig. On Tuesday we toured Staniel Cay which gave us our first feel of an Exuma town. The two grocery stores were really small - they seemed to have less food and household supplies in them than we had in our house in Ottawa! One of the attractions of Staniel Cay is Thunderball Cave, which was featured in both the 1960s Bond 007 movie "Thunderball" and in the movie "Splash". The snorkeling in and around the cave was pretty neat. We brought some cut up potatoes with us (the left-overs from the pig adventure!) and dozens of small tropical fish went into a feeding frenzy - Ruth couldn't see her hands through the fish as she was feeding them! The cave also had some of the best coral we've seen yet.



Sailing on the banks between Eleuthera and the Exumas


Our neighbour at Hawksbill Cay


Hawksbill Cay


Ruth feeding a pig at Big Majors Spot


Beach of conch shells at Staniel Cay


Town of Black Point on Great Guana Cay

Position Reports

Because we haven't been able to get internet for the last little while, we thought we'd point out that you can always find out where we are by looking at our position report. The link is in the sidebar at the top right of the main page.

Southbound

9 June 2008

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

The Hub of Abaco

3 June 2008

After spending a couple of days at Great Guana Cay, we left for Man-o-War Cay. Man-o-War is an old community of predominantly white people who have been living on the island for generations. Inter-marriages between members of the same extended family are quite common. This is evident in the names of many of the businesses. On Man-o-War, the predominant family name is Albury, so signs can be found everywhere for Albury's Ferry, Albury Boats, etc.

Our time at Man-o-War was hot. During the day we saw 34C with high humidity, and the coolest it got at night was 28C with almost no breeze. The harbour is small and well protected, and it was full of boats, most of them left for the season on moorings. On our second day there, we saw another Canadian catamaran come in, and so we met Tim and Carol. They are from Ontario and had lived in Ottawa in the past. They are travelling aboard their boat, a Manta 42 catamaran named "Somerset 33". We spent a nice afternoon and evening at a restaurant on shore chatting with them until the staff kicked us out because they wanted to close up for the night!

We got to experience some local culture on Man-o-War Cay as well. We noticed a handwritten sign advertising dinner at "Sheila's", so we decided to go there. It turned out that it was take-out (we didn't know), and it was cooked in the house of a woman named Sheila. The food sounded good, so we stood in a sort of small living room waiting to get our order. Just as we picked up the food, it started raining heavily (the first real rain we'd seen since Vero Beach!). Sheila took pity on us and offered us to stay right there and eat, which we did while a stream of locals shuffled in an out getting their take-out food. We both thought this was a neat way to see the local life.

We spent four days on Man-o-War and then had a great sail over to Marsh Harbour on Great Abaco Island. We were headed there to reprovision our fresh food supplies. Marsh Harbour is a relatively small town, but it is the main town in the Abacos. This means that it has more stores and services, like two full grocery stores and multiple hardware stores. Marsh Harbour felt very much like a second world town - a juxtaposition between first world (newer cars and modern stores) and third world (dusty streets and many small rundown houses). Shopping in the Bahamas is very interesting because of where the products come from. As expected, many items are brought in from the US, but because the island nation is a commonwealth country, they also have a fair number of products from Europe such as Irish butter. While doing our groceries we were also quite surprised to find orange peppers from Canada - this being only late May, we assumed from a greenhouse!

The following day we headed over to Hope Town on Elbow Cay. Hope Town is famous in the Bahamas for its picturesque lighthouse and the quaint town that surrounds the harbour. The town has the feel of a small version of Niagara-on-the-Lake or Merrickville with a tropical climate. We climbed up the lighthouse and saw great views of the Little Bahama Bank, the Atlantic and Hope Town.

Geoff tried to install the watermaker we'd been carrying since Ottawa - and found out that we were missing some parts. (Watermakers are used to make drinking water from sea water. The units work on the reverse-osmosis principle). We needed to get some fittings for the pre-filter, so we headed back to Marsh Harbour. While we were there, Geoff spent some time scrubbing our waterline to remove the grass skirt we've been carrying around with us since Vero Beach. Geru is now looking a little less grungy, although she is still awaiting a good cleaning topside.

While in Marsh Harbour, we met up with Somerset33 again and with Tania and Greg from Wobbley (another boat with an Ottawa registry!) whom we had briefly met before at Green Turtle Cay. It was a neat gathering as everyone was from or familiar with the Ottawa area. Tania and Greg do a lot of snowmobiling in their hometown of Manotick, which is just outside Ottawa. We learned that in the summer people actually race snowmobiles on the water there! Apparently it works if you've got enough speed, and apparently the snowmobiles still work fine even after getting a dunking. Sounds like quite the event to watch!


Street on Man-o-War Cay


Bank on Man-o-War (not your typical-looking RBC branch!)


Fuel barge (actually a barge with a fuel truck on it!)


Geru anchored outside Hope Town harbour
(view from the lighthouse)


Hope Town harbour


Hope Town lighthouse


Hope Town street


Hope Town street


A perfect sailing day (temp is water temperature)

Sailing the Abacos

21 May 2008

Over the last couple of weeks we have done yet more sailing. It is so nice to be moving with the wind and no diesel engine noise in the background, just the sound of "Auto" steering the boat. We are slowly working our way south down the Abaco chain. Since the last post we've made stops at Coopers Town, Green Turtle Cay, and Great Guana Cay.

On Saturday, we were anchored just off the Coopers Town sea wall for the night. We stayed on the boat that evening. Coopers Town looks much like Fox Town, a small Bahamian village. On Sunday we headed over to Green Turtle Cay. Green Turtle turned out to be a longer stop for us than we had originally intended - we ended up staying for a week as we met up with old friends who are heading north. Shortly after we had anchored in White Sound at Green Turtle Cay and were settling in, we heard someone calling "Geru Geru" so we popped our heads out and there were Brian and Lynn from Midori, who we'd last seen in Brunswick, Georgia! What a nice surprise. We spent a great evening dinner catching up on each others' stories.

On Tuesday, Lynn and Brian rented a golf cart for the four of us. We toured Green Turtle Cay, took in the town of New Plymouth, and did a little snorkelling. The island has one main paved road; the rest are dirt roads that seem to fit one car or two golf carts. Golf carts are pretty standard transportation on the smaller islands here, and they outnumbered the few cars/trucks on Green Turtle. New Plymouth is a neat little town with narrow streets and quaint old houses painted in pastel colours. We spent a few hours exploring and had a great lunch of cracked conch (tenderized conch pieces fried in batter). We had planned on snorkelling on the Atlantic side of Green Turtle, but the sea was too rough so we ended up in a bay on the Sea of Abaco side and, boy, was the water warm! We didn't see very much other than a few fish as there are no reefs on the Sea of Abaco side.

On Thursday, we were invited to go out on a trawler (a larger live-aboard motor boat) for a day of snorkelling at Powell Cay. It was an interesting trip as we had never been on a trawler before. Sitting by the helm on the upper deck, one is fairly high above the water. Quite a different view than on our boat, and the trawler also rocks quite differently in the waves. We spent the first portion of the day walking the beaches and shallow waters in a protected bay on the Atlantic side, and we ended up finding a large conch. We brought "Conchie" (later renamed "George") back with us. We spent the afternoon snorkelling around a sunken dredging barge, which was being used as a shelter by quite a few tropical fish.

On our way back from the snorkelling day, we saw that Zulia, another Canadian boat we know and had been expecting, had arrived at Green Turtle on their way back north. Zulia is another Prout 37 catamaran like Geru. We had first met Liz and Chris from Zulia in person in Brunswick, Georgia, but we had actually been in e-mail contact with them long before that. We had some issues when we first registered our boat in Ottawa several months before we left on our trip. We found Zulia as a sistership to Geru on the Canadian ship registry, and we contacted Liz and Chris for some information we needed for the registry, which they graciously supplied.

We spent a few days enjoying Green Turtle Cay, the pool at the Bluff House, and sharing a few meals with Liz and Chris and Lynn and Brian. It was tough to say good-bye.

We left Green Turtle on Monday and headed to Great Guana Cay. The passage between Green Turtle and Great Guana normally involves transiting the Whale Channel, which means heading out into the Atlantic and back to the Sea of Abaco. However, being a catamaran we decided to do the more direct shallow-draft route - the Dont Rock passage, named after a large rock (actually more of a tiny island) at its end. Most boats can't take this path as there is only 4-5' of water depth. The bottom is pure sand. The passage was really neat as the water colour changed from blue to turquoise green to almost white as we passed over the shallowest parts.

We had been told by Midori to stop at Great Guana Cay and check out the restaurant/bar called Nippers. Nippers has a pig roast every Sunday afternoon (really a buffet) which we'd been told to go to. We were there on a Tuesday, but decided to go anyway. Nippers sits atop a sandy bluff overlooking the Atlantic. We stopped by for a drink in the afternoon. As we were sitting looking out at the ocean, a group of good-looking women in bikinis and makeup showed up. Ruth commented that they must be models. It turned out that they were actually doing their photography at Nippers - and so we ended up in the middle of a Hooters Calendar Girls photo shoot! We were quite literally "in the middle" as the photographer set up for the shoot right where we were sitting. We ended up talking to him and to some of the women and watched the photo session. So we missed the Sunday party, but still witnessed quite an event!


On Green Turtle Cay


George (the conch) coming out of its shell


Ruth cutting up conch


Conch shell and conch meat


The view from Nippers


Hooters Girls photo shoot on the beach


Hooters Girls photo shoot on the beach


Hooters Patrol yacht


Heather (Miss Fort Lauderdale) and Ruth

We are in the Bahamas!

Tuesday morning we left the marina at West End to head onto the Little Bahama Bank. As we left the harbour (still on the ocean side), we were in a pretty good sea and it was fairly rough as we headed towards Indian Cay Channel, our chosen entrance to the bank. The Little Bahama Bank is a large expanse of shallow water surrounded by reefs and islands (the smaller ones being called "cays" here) with a few passable entrances from the ocean. The pass onto the bank was interesting as the waves initally were quite large, but as soon as we were on the bank it smoothed out to much less than on the ocean side.

Arriving on the Little Bahama Bank was amazing - it is shallow enough to see the bottom as it is generally 10 feet or less in depth, and it extended as far as we could see with no land in sight. Our first night was spent at Mangrove Cay. We went to bed with the boat rocking gently in the small waves. When we woke up in the morning, it was dead calm with only a few ripples on the water - what a neat place to be! We almost whispered when we went out on deck, it was so still. Around us, sea met sky with a few small islands visible in the distance.

We left Mangrove Cay on Wednesday and spent an hour or so calibrating our autopilot. We had carried the autopilot in a box since Ottawa, we finally installed it in Vero Beach, but it needed to be calibrated before we could actually use it. Calibration entails motoring large circles and letting the autopilot take the boat on a zig-zag course of its choosing, and we had not had the calm seas and large space required to do that until now. Once "Auto" was calibrated, we let him steer us for most of the day to Great Sale Cay. What a great change for us - to be able to stand back from the helm and not having to constantly steer the boat by hand.

We had planned on spending an extra day at Great Sale Cay to catch our breath and fix some minor boat things. However, after a rough night with seas starting to roll directly into the anchorage and the wind looking like it would continue to blow from the same unfavourable direction, we decided to head out to find a calmer anchorage to spend the next night. We left Great Sale Cay and were able to sail (not motorsail) for a while - this was a first since we left Ottawa! It was wonderful to turn off the engine and glide quietly over the water. The sailing didn't last very long, though, as the wind was shifting and we ended up with the wind on our nose and bashing into two foot waves with spray on the deck. The day was pretty good as Auto was at the helm so we weren't constantly working to keep on course. We spent the night anchored just off of the town of Fox Town on Little Abaco Island.

On Friday, we checked into one of the cruisers' nets on our SSB radio and had a great chat on the radio with Skip from Isolde II, who is currently up in Brunswick, Georgia. We found out all the latest going-ons about our cruising friends up there. As Ruth says, the Jungle Drums work well. After lunch we headed into shore to see our first Bahamian town. Fox Town has a few colourful houses along the road, a grocery store (7-eleven size with mostly empty shelves) and two gas stations. We found the locals to be very friendly - a young gentleman came up to us and offered us a taste of freshly made banana pie (more like cake). Near the edge of town we found the school and the community clinic, both of which looked very new. The clinic, in particular, looked like an elaborate home with extensive landscaping. One of the locals told us that much of the town has been rebuilt over the last several years after hurricane Floyd destroyed much of the area.

The weather has been hot over the last few days, hitting 30C with lows at night around 26C. We are both finding it a bit too hot at times. There is usually a breeze, though, and when we have our two main hatches open, it keeps the inside of the boat fairly comfortable. We have seen little to no rain here so far. Our last real rains were the heavy thunderstorms in Vero Beach.


Waters of the Little Bahama Bank


Sunset over the Banks (if you look carefully, you can see one other boat anchored)


Geru anchored off of Fox Town


House in Fox Town

Crossing the Gulf Stream

Crossing the Gulf Stream from the East coast of the US to the Bahamas is considered a bit of a right of passage for sailors. The Gulf Stream is literally a stream of warm water in the ocean which heads north at two to three knots (nautical miles per hour). This current not only pushes you north as you are heading east from Florida to the Bahames, but if there is any wind from the north (which opposes the direction of this current), you get a very rough and potentially dangerous sea. The passage is also long enough (69 nautical miles or about 124 km) that you're out of sight of land for most of it.

We had to wait for the right weather for our crossing for over a week, which is what enabled us to see as much of Fort Lauderdale as we did. We left Lake Sylvia at four o'clock on Monday morning. As we left the anchorage, we realized that some of our navigation lights weren't working (why is it that things only stop working when you need them?), so we rigged up some temporary lights so we would be seen. It turned out this was necessary, as there was a surprising amount of boat traffic in the pitch darkness. Fort Lauderdale has many bright lights, but it was a new moon and it was very dark on the water. A sailboat crossed our path on the ICW and a megayacht followed us out to sea. Just as we were heading out the harbour mouth, we came upon a freighter which was coming into Port Everglades. This gave us (really just Geoff) pause for thought about the big ships out there in the dark (Ruth grew up sailing in their midst, so she was used to that thought). After pushing over to the side to pass the freighter, we were out and off. As we travelled east, we did see quite a few lights from other freighters off in the distance.

A couple of hours into our trip, we saw an odd light ahead of us - and then watched our first sunrise at sea. Our passage across was smooth. There was little wind, the waves were relatively small, and we motored the whole way. The day was very hot and muggy and it would have been nice to have some wind to cool it down, but we weren't complaining as the lack of wind kept the sea calmer for our first ocean passage. The water temperature was a steady 28C all day. We saw a few groups of flying fish, and then, to our amazement, about two-thirds of the way across (and therefore still over 20 Nm from land), a small bird (a common yellowthroat - thanks for the ID, Janie!) landed on our boat and visited with us for a while before flying off again.

We arrived at Old Bahama Bay Marina in West End on Grand Bahama Island at four o'clock in the afternoon, 12 hours after we left Fort Lauderdale - a long but successful day bringing us to our second foreign country of this trip!


A screen capture of our navigation software as we left Fort Lauderdale (all the red triangles are larger ships)


Sunrise in the Gulf Stream


Sunrise in the Gulf Stream


Our little visitor (common yellowthroat)


Geru in the Bahamas (hiding behind the dock)


Our first sunset in the Bahamas