Sout’ Side Route

It is a whole different world out here on the sout’ side. Miles and miles of turquoise water with no other boats in sight. Uninhabited islands in the distance. Our first day on this route went well. We were able to sail most of the day and stopped for the night at Rocky Point. The anchorage was calm in 8 knots of breeze. Since we would be going through an area with a depth of 5.9 feet at low tide the next day we wanted to know when exactly low tide would be. We knew it should be sometime around mid-morning but wanted to get a better idea since we wanted to avoid going through there at dead low tide. It isn’t always easy to figure out the tides in the Bahamas. Most places relate their tides to the tides in Nassau—1 hour after Nassau tide, 1/2 after Nassau tides, etc.  For a location as isolated as Rocky Point we really didn’t have a good reference.  We knew the tide was falling through the afternoon and evening so George took the hand-held depth sounder and took readings every 1/2 hour until we went to bed. Based on those readings it looked like low tide was about 9:30 pm. That gave us a good idea about the time of this morning’s low tide so we could plan accordingly. When we arrived at the shallow area at Duck Cays the depth was 8.2 feet. 

Just after we pulled up the anchor this morning we were joined by a dolphin. It first jumped out of the water just beside me at the helm. Then it swam up to play near George at the bow for a while. So cool.