The crossing of the Gulf Stream from Miami to the Great Bahama Bank (A shallow shelf in the sea, not a place to keep money) was not quite as easy as we’d imagined. We thought with a west wind of 20 - 25 knots we’d fly across to our first way point just north of Bimini, the western most Bahamian Island. In reality we could only sail southeast or northwest of our mark, because the wind was right at our back. Putting the sails out wing and wing was difficult to maintain as it was a bit too rough for Kenny to put out the whisker pole with his delicate knee.
We reluctantly resolved to motor-sail and after ten hours gratefully arrived on the crystal clear, suddenly calm, waters of the Bank. We ended up going through a cut in the Bimini Island chain rather than shooting for the more northerly waypoint. The only disadvantage to that was that we found ourselves sailing in 6 to 10 feet of water, which when it became dark started to spook me. What if the shoals shifted and the chartplotter was no longer accurate? In daylight, you can see shallows and sail around them, but at night… I woke Kenny and told him I wanted to deviate from our course to sail in deeper water. He sleepily agreed, not knowing it would add 16 nautical miles to our trip. The good part was that this new course made for a lovely point of sail and we gently moved through slightly deeper and calm waters at 4-5 knots underneath a sky emblazoned with stars.
Later on my watch at about 3 a.m., I decided we should drop the anchor and sleep for a couple of hours and wait until daylight before going through another potentially tricky area. Once again, the captain acquiesced. The banks are no more than 30 feet in most places, so if it’s fairly calm you can drop the anchor anywhere.
We docked at the Nassau Yacht Haven at 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, January 9. I apologized to the customs officer for making her work on a Sunday evening. She was very nice and gave us a 90 day visa. (Many cruisers have been given only 30 days, for reasons unknown to us.) Cruising in the Bahamas for one season costs $300 which includes a fishing permit. Not cheap.
We enjoyed a dinner out at the Poop Deck, adjacent to our marina. It was ridiculously expensive as is everything in the Bahamas, but we felt like celebrating. That night we slept like the dead.
The following day, I trudged off to Batleco (the phone company) while Kenny washed the boat. I purchased a Blackberry last summer because it has a GSM chip, and I was told it could be used all over the world. A Sprint employee explained that all I needed to do, was take out the Sprint SIM card and put in the card of the country in which I was traveling. Tiffany Ferguson, a very lovely and helpful employee of Batelco, tried to assist me in this procedure, only to discover that Sprint had put a lock on the phone preventing me from converting it to a Batelco phone while visiting the Bahamas. I intend to break my contract with Sprint, and if I had the energy I would start a class action suit against them, as this seems to me a highly illegal practice.
I bought a calling card from Tiffany instead which can be used with pay phones. I tried using it that evening to no avail, so the following day I tramped back to Batelco and got yet another card, which does work, though my mother was not in when I called. I shall use it, the next opportunity I get.
After two nights in Nassau, Kenny and I moved Mary T to an anchorage just six miles to the east next to a tiny piece of rock and scrub with a few houses, called Rose Island. It provides excellent protection from the north and was a lovely place to sit out a cold front and enjoy kayaking. I discovered a little beach with chairs and a hammock, which I rested in one day before kayaking back to Mary T.
We intended to leave Rose Island after 3 nights but the wind was still rather fierce, so we decided to stick it out one more day and headed for Shroud Cay in the Exuma chain on Saturday, January 15. We will always remember Rose Island because it was a place of many firsts. There, Kenny baked his first loaf of bread; I made my first granola; and I wrote my first tune (the Cruising Blues) on the Ukulele. Now instead of listening to Polly Wolly Doodle ad nauseum, Kenny has to suffer through endless repetitions of “The Cruising Blues.”
A very lively sail from Rose Island landed us in Shroud Cay a couple of days ago. It is part of the Exuma Land and Sea Park, which means it’s a no take zone - no fishing, no hunting, etc. There are creeks there which run through the mangroves so we took a spin in our dinghy and felt like Katherine Hepburn and Humprey Bogart on African Queen, only more comfortable. Another couple from Maryland, Sarah and Phil aboard Spartina, joined us in their dinghy and then invited us over for a sundowner aboard their boat. Phil and Sarah are our new best friends, and they share some old friends in common with Kenny. It turns out we’d all met a few years ago at the mutual friends’ house (the Scotts) on the Eastern shore of Maryland.
We are currently (as of January 18) in Wardrick Wells, which is also part of the Land and Sea Park and another truly magical, postcard kind o’ place. As we picked up our mooring, banana quit birds joined us in the cockpit to scour for crumbs. They have no fear of people as they used to be fed sugar by hand on the deck of the park warden’s office. Now that they’ve become somewhat pesky, that practice has ended. A minute ago, one landed right on my computer.
Tomorrow if it’s warm enough, I hope to do a bit of snorkeling and a hike through the park will be in order. Until our next entry, know that while the dazzling Bahamian waters continue to enchant us, we are missing you all.
We later moved on the the Little Farmers Yacht Club to check out the bar and restaurant there. Owner Roosevelt Nixon greeted us and chatted a while as the four of us were the only customers. He showed us some great photos of Little Farmers taken about 100 years earlier showing residents picking cotton and Bahamian sloops fishing in the harbor. Between Terry and Roosevelt, we learned quite a lot about the area.
