Have you ever taken a car trip through The Blue Ridge Mountains and the Skyline drive? Or perhaps driven through the beautiful mountains and woods or Colorado or Oregon. I have done this and what I said to myself when I did this is I wish I could take a day or a week or a year to see that trail or go down that dirt road and see what's around the bend. My Dad was like this too and perhaps it is just human nature. Well we did the equivalent of that blasting through the unparralleled Exuma's, down to Georgetown in 3 days.
We motored out of Nassau while I did my favorite thing, watching the bottom through a glassy sea. Nassau harbor is full of trash, no surprise, but as soon as you get out of the range of a small outboard boat the trash disappears. 5 hours of motoring and sailing (the wind finally piped in) and we anchored at Allans Cay. The area is a collection of a dozen small islets inhabited by 100 iguannas. The cool thing about it is the way the tide flows through the little anchorage. We anchored the boat in 8 ft of water with two 3 ft sand bars on either side. The colors and the remoteness of the place is magical. We took off in the dinghy, explored a beach, and snorkelled on several rich reefs. I can't get enough of this stuff! "There's a dark area over there, let's check it out". Over the side with mask, the initial shock of the cool water, you focus your eyes and there lyes an intense little world of coral, plants, and the multitudes of colors in the fish and flora. You could spend the whole afternoon there but we have about an hour before sunset and cocktail hour.
The act of having your rum punch in hand as the sun sets and you know your anchor is set solid and the weather is fair conjures up some sort of magic. In that brief moment you are so happy and proud and thankful for everything that got you there.
We discovered that the high frequency radio works so we can get the awesome weather synopsis from Chris Parker. This was a giant relief for me as weather is everything here. We had a beautiful reach for 50 miles to Staniel Cay. For fellow James Bond fans they filmed much of the move nearby. The local bar has photos of Connery as a young man. He must have fallen in love with the Bahamas then as he lives in Nassau now.
The next day was very windy (the too much/not enough wind problem). Steve wanted to try to sail so we exited Dothan Cut into Exuma sound. Waves and the wind were too much for me so we aborted mission and anchored at Black Point, a small friendly town with 2 bars. While searching out an internet connection we discovered that the whole town was anxious for the arrival of the "mailboat", which brings all the stuff on which everyone depends. Heading to the bar a group of kids were playing baseball happily in the street. As we passed one kid says, "let the white people pass".
The next morning we were up and motoring out of the pass. It was very calm as I like it but the wind direction was not cooperating so we took a tack away from land for an hour to get a better angle on the wind. I put out two fishing lines and enjoyed the morning. I looked back at the lines and yelled to Steve as a large dolphin jumped totally out of the water. A second later the reel with the silver spoon was bent and taking line. We had caught a 4 ft dolphin. I filleted about 5 lbs. of meat from the beauty and pulled the fishing lines back in. That was exhausting.
We were closing on our destination at about 2:30 so I studied the chart and something wasn't adding up. I had been through this area before and it didn't look familiar. After some checking I discovered that we had sailed to Lee Stocking Island, not Stocking Island, as intended. A quick syphering (Jethro Bodine) with the GPS machine and we disocvered that we had another 25 miles to go. We throttled up as the wind had died and we were going through the cut at STOCKING island at sunset. This is not a small thing as there are reefs and sandbars to dodge. Thank you technology! The chartplotter machine showed all the hazards which we dodged with no problems. The anchor went down in 8 ft on a sand bottom amidst some of the 400 boats in this popular anchorage. As darkness set in and the sounds of friends laughing and playing music on the other boats, I sipped my drink. Damn that tasted good.
No comments:
Post a Comment