Breeze On

Our exit from the slip at Emerald Bay went much more smoothly than our entrance. The wind was in the mid-to-upper teens from the NE so, although some waves had built up in the channel, they weren’t too bad. We turned to the NW and sailed in 4 to 6 foot seas to Rat Cay Cut with just the mainsail. As we made our way to Children’s Bay we passed by a rock that looks like a mushroom. It almost looks like it was placed there. We anchored at Children’s Bay to wait for tomorrow morning’s high tide. I decided yesterday that my hair is too long and out of control. George agreed to cut it for me this afternoon and I think he did a pretty darn good job. 

This morning Doug rented a car and we toured Great Exuma Island. Our rental car had the steering wheel on the right hand side. Doug did a fine job of driving on the left hand side of the road and avoiding the potholes on the edge of the road.  First, we went south to Georgetown.  After walking around Georgetown and visiting a few of the shops we got back in the car and continued south to Little Exuma Island. To get from Great Exuma to Little Exuma you have to drive over a short one lane bridge. Fortunately, no vehicles were coming the other way at that moment! After we crossed over the Tropic of Cancer we stopped and ate an early lunch at Santana’s. The food was delicious traditional Bahamian food. Doug, Laura and George ordered ribs and I ordered grouper. We all had sides of cole slaw, peas & rice and corn. Before lunch, though, we bought baked goods at Mom’s Bakery next door. After lunch Laura noticed what looked like sharks swimming back and forth near Santana’s. It was...

A few hours after we swam with the dolphin a line of squalls came through. The wind shifted to the north and the surge increased, making the anchorage very rolly. It remained rolly all night and we had a miserable night’s sleep. At one point I had the thought that the dolphin wasn’t worth all of the rolliness. (It was.) We got up at 6 am and had the anchor up by 7 am. One advantage of staying the extra day was that we had a nice, fast sail across Exuma Sound.  We decided to pull into the Marina at Emerald Bay, just north of Georgetown instead of anchoring at Georgetown. A cold front was forecast to come through today and we might be stuck on the boat of we were at anchor. Also, Doug and Laura need to get to the airport on Wednesday and it will be much easier to do that from the marina, given the forecast for the next few days.  The wind started out in the teens yesterday morning but increased as the day went on. By the time we were near the marina it was over 20 knots and the ...

This afternoon, just after we dropped the anchor at Calabash Bay, Doug, Laura, George and I went for a swim. We were all in the water when Doug noticed something swimming toward him. At first he thought it was a snorkeler but it was swimming too fast to be a snorkeler.  Then he thought it might be a shark or a ray, or maybe a dolphin. It swam under him and headed for Laura and me. He yelled over to us that a dolphin might be headed our way. We didn’t hear him but we did hear the dolphin blow air out of it’s blow hole behind us. I turned around and saw that it was within 6 feet of me!  It swam closer and I thought I might be able to touch it. I couldn’t quite touch it before it swam over to visit George. Then it swam away. It was the coolest experience we have had in the Bahamas. A dolphin visiting each one of us!  We left Thompson Bay yesterday morning and motored up to Hog Cay. The water was so calm and clear that we could see everything on the bottom as we motored along...

This morning we ventured to shore for the first time in three days. It was still quite windy and choppy but we needed to pick up our friends, Doug and Laura, at the airport. Once we got the dinghy in the water and the motor on the dinghy, the ride to shore wasn’t as bad as we thought it would be. We went into an area we call “the cove”. We thought the water would be calmer there and it would be easier loading their luggage onto the dinghy from there. Since we were renting a car to pick them up we also took the opportunity to do our laundry at a laundromat 30 minutes away. After we met them at the airport we stopped at the Forest Takeaway for our late lunch/early dinner. We returned to Thompson Bay by the late afternoon before the sun set. George took three trips with the dinghy to get the four of us, our laundry and their luggage to the boat. The weather forecast has been so uncertain that we aren’t sure where we are going from here. We have a tentative plan, but it could always change...

Neither George nor I like to clean fish. Therefore, we don’t catch any. Most cruisers in the Bahamas do catch fish, conch and lobsters so we are in the minority. This morning, though, George did make a catch. He was looking around the anchorage and happened to spot a pool noodle sailing our way pretty quickly. By the time we got the boat hook, the noodle had caught on the anchor rode. Easy catch! It has a slit up the side so most likely came off of someone’s boat upwind of us. Tomorrow morning, on the VHF morning net, we will ask if anyone is missing a pool noodle.  It is very windy today (mid 20’s, gusting to 30) and is forecast to be even windier tomorrow so we are staying on the boat and doing boat chores, reading and watching a movie. 

As the northeast US is getting slammed by a snowstorm, the same cold front is affecting us with more wind. Right now the wind is from the southwest, a direction for which there is no protection at all in Thompson Bay. We opted to stay here because the southwest winds were not forecast to stay very long before clocking to the west, behind Indian Hole Point. The southwest wind will be with us longer than we had hoped but we will survive. Because there is no protection from land a wind chop builds up in the water. Right now it is about 2-3 feet and all of the boats in the harbor are bouncing.  This morning I attended another aqua fitness class and was once again the only student aside from the instructor’s husband. George drove me in the dinghy and went for a walk during our class. (He is not an exercise class kind of guy). The choppy water made the class even more challenging and I got hit in the face by a wave more than once. Then we had quite an exciting dinghy ride back to Breeze ...