S/V Geru: 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!