It was motorboating weather when we left Nassau, but that was fine with us. We wanted to start getting a feel for eyeball piloting, and the calm day meant that it was easy to see through the flat water. Heading southeast just out of the harbor, the bottom was a sandy desert besprinkled with starfish, easily seen through twenty feet of clear seawater.
We took the "chicken route" going 2 miles southeast of Porgee Rocks then almost due south to pass around the Yellow Bank, rather than going across it and possibly dodging coral heads. We still kept a lookout forward, though, and dodged around some suspicious dark patches that were probably only grass fifteen feet down. Our autopilot control head is a remote on a nice long leash, so we took turns sitting on the dinghy which was still lashed in front of the mast, driving with the autopilot. The only difficult thing is that the autopilot's depth readout is in meters, and we're used to feet, so we had to do a bit of conversion to figure out what we were looking down into. On the other hand, the charts for the Bahamas are also all in meters, so it's probably simpler for us to just go metric. (Our draft, we figured, is 1.63 meters.)
Allan's Cay is actually a group of three small islets with an anchorage in the middle. We easily entered the anchorage and found a nice spot. It was hard to believe we were in 13 feet of water -- the bottom seemed so close and clear. We dropped two anchors, the CQR in front and the Spade in back. We hadn't used the Spade since our miserable experience in Stuart, but this time it set after dragging only a short distance, and it dug in well under power. We looked down and saw it just under the boat, buried up to the shackle in the sand.
It was weird to look down and see our anchors below us. We got an even weirder view when we jumped in (that water had been beckoning us all day) and looked at the bottom of our boat, hanging there in the water! It was a very odd perspective, not one we have been used to, but it sure was nice to be able to assess the bottom. There weren't any barnacles on the hull, but we're not sure if it was the bottom paint doing its job, or just the layer of ICW mud which still coated Windom below the waterline. No mud on the leading edge of the keel, nor bottom paint -- it was clear we'd run into the bottom hard a few times! The prop shaft had a lot of barnacles on it, and the prop had a few. The zincs were well corroded, so when we get a chance we'll replace them with our spares.
Boat chores, however, had to wait. The next morning was another bright, calm, warm morning, and it felt like we'd finally found summer. After breakfast, we dinghied over and picked up Terry and Trish from Flirt on our way to Leaf Cay, one of the bits of the Allan's Cay group, to see the rock iguanas. They are a species endemic to the Bahamas, now found only on this island group. These big lizards (the largest were about the size of skinny cats) came right out when we landed; they watched us warily, but didn't seem too frightened, and eventually they posed for some pictures. Unfortunately, when we got back to the boat and tried to download the photos to our computer, our digital camera's hard disk crashed, and we couldn't manage to revive it. I guess it finally succumbed to the rough treatment that is inevitable on a boat. We'll try to get it going again, but this may mean an end to the illustrated log, alas. At least until we get back to civilization and can buy a new one.
While we lunched in our cockpit, several other cruisers dinghied up to say hi. The anchorage was popular but not overcrowded, and we recognized many of the boats we'd seen before in Chub Cay and Nassau. We finally met the family on Peace and Aloha, who we'd heard checking in regularly on the SSB net: a couple and their two twenty-something sons. Like us, they had almost no sailing experience when they decided to buy a boat and go cruising. Their 62-foot custom boat, though, makes our 40-footer look like a dinghy! There seem to be a lot of cruisers out here like us, with relatively little experience but with the desire and will (and funds) to go cruising. I suspect that the boom times of the 90's, combined with technological advances such as GPS, are to blame. I imagine the old-time cruisers who look down their noses at things like roller furling and auxiliary engines aren't too happy about all of us neo-cruisers clogging up their cruising grounds without having "paid our dues". But I think that what we lack in experience we make up in our assiduous book-learning and preparation, and in taking seriously the things we're trying to do.
After lunch, we set out in the dinghy for a serious snorkeling expedition. It was to be a hunting expedition too -- we were out of fresh meat, and Britt was anxious to try out the pole spear he'd bought just before we left Florida. We found a likely spot and anchored in the sand nearby, our first use of the secondhand dinghy anchor we'd gotten for $8 in Annapolis. Masks and snorkels and fins on, we flipped ourselves overboard and into the world of the reef. It was just spectacular. Sergeant-majors, parrotfish, a French angelfish, and huge schools of a blue and yellow striped fish that might have been some sort of grunt all swam around the coral formations. Two barracuda swam by, and Britt swore to me he saw a hammerhead shark off in the distance.
At a second reef, we both saw a black-tipped shark, along with a queen triggerfish and the usual assortment of colorful reef fishes. Britt also spotted a small Nassau grouper, and after pointing it out to me he snuck up on it and deployed the pole spear. Dinner!
The next day was a bit cooler and windier, so we didn't make it into the water. Instead we lazed around and read a bit. Britt worked on his fishing tackle, and I baked a loaf of bread. We dinghied over to Allan's Cay for a hike, but the vegetation was so thick that we were mostly confined to one ridge of limestone. The limestone resembles very hard swiss cheese, big holes surrounded by crumbly lace, and was a little tricky to hike across. I added a rock to one of the huge cairns at the microsummit, and watched sailboats approaching the anchorage.
This is a popular spot, but most boats stay only a night or two. In the morning, half the 12 or so boats leave for points south, and then during the afternoon an equal number dribble in to spend the next night. We thought about leaving after our second night, but then heard on the SSB net that our friends on Odyssey were on their way over, so of course we had to stay. It really wasn't hard to decide to spend another few days here. It's nice to have no appointments to keep, no plans, no strings attached.
The following day we snorkeled with Alex from Odyssey and managed to find one small lobster that had been overlooked by the hordes of lobster-mad cruisers. After eating it for lunch, we decided that we too were lobster-mad cruisers. Yum yum. Then we went back to Leaf Cay for another visit with the iguanas. Christopher and Michael, Alex and Penelope's kids, dug an iguana trap in the sand and spent the afternoon trying to trap them. It was easy to lure the iguanas onto the palm fronds covering the deadfall pit; unfortunately (for the kids; fortunately for the iguanas) they just scrambled right back out again each time.
Alex and Britt went hunting again, and although they came back with lots of stories about big sharks, they didn't come back with dinner. It turned out to be ok, though, because Santana, a Catana catamaran out of San Francisco, invited the whole anchorage over for a cocktail party that turned out to have enough snacks to do us for the evening.
Entering Norman's Cay anchorage was pretty cool -- a tongue of deep water extended out like a trail, and we just followed it in. We're getting a little more comfortable with this eyeball navigation thing, although I suspect we do a lot of dodging around 10-foot deep grass patches. Norman's used to be the base for a druglord in the 1970's. One of the artifacts remaining from those days is a crashed plane in the anchorage. The story we heard was that the pilot was high and tried to land on a moonbeam rather than the airstrip.
There are a number of abandoned buildings from the drug days on the island, and we hiked around and looked at them. Norman's is pretty big, but cruisers are not supposed to go anywhere north of the airstrip because it's developed with big fancy private homes belonging to rich people who don't want boater scum nearby. Or so I gathered.
It was too cool and windy for snorkeling, so we decided to go fishing instead. We found a nice little point of limestone near the southeast edge of the island and anchored the dinghy in a shallow cove where we could easily wade ashore. Britt showed me how to cast (I've never done any fishing), and we tossed a few lures in. A few minutes later, Britt yelped, "Whoa! I got something!". His line grew taut as the drag went off. Something big and gray splashed around, then dove. Suddenly, it leapt clear out of the water -- it was a shark! At least four or five feet of shark, maybe more; it bit through the line (we weren't using steel leaders) and disappeared. Personally, I was relieved. What the heck would we have done if it had stayed caught?
The wind was still blowing like stink but had moved around to northeasterly by Sunday morning 2/6. We picked up our anchors shortly after breakfast and had a fun but extremely short downwind sail to Shroud Cay, 6 miles to the south. The anchorage here is just a spot close up against the western shore, but it provided good lee protection and it seemed much calmer than Norman's.
We were the only boats there, so we had our pick of coastline. We anchored as close as we dared to the shore, just off a crystalline pocket beach, and surveyed our private domain for a few minutes before going below. We tidied up below a bit, then made lunch. Since it seemed calm enough to eat alfresco, we popped up to the cockpit -- and saw two other boats anchored nearby, and three more on their way in! So much for our solitude.
After lunch, we dropped the dinghy and zipped over to the little beach. Steps cut into the limestone behind it led up to a trail which led to several small sinkholes and one big well. We poked around a bit and then went back to the dinghy for more exploration.
Shroud Cay is basically a big limestone doughnut with a mangrove swamp filling. Salt creeks cut through the mangroves, across the island. We dinghied around to the south to a large cut. The tide was going out, and the current flowing from the creek was noticeable. The water at the creek's mouth was a bright translucent green, contrasting beautifully with the aqua waters along the edge of the cay. The creek shallowed quickly, and once we could make no further progress we turned the outboard off and let the current sweep us back to the aquamarine.
We explored several creeks this way, but didn't make much progress up any of them. One had a deep spot just past the bar at the mouth, which was written up in the guidebook as a possible anchorage. We could see a mast as we approached, but it was at an odd angle, and when we arrived we saw Colleen, a boat we'd seen in Nassau, pretty well grounded on the bar. The people aboard were in good spirits, figuring they'd just wait for high tide -- and in the meantime, they'd take the opportunity to scrub the bottom. We also needed high tide in order to do more serious exploration of the interior of Shroud Cay, so we returned to our boat, where I baked coffee cake while Britt read.
The next day we woke early, and after a quick breakfast headed out in the dinghy to the creek just north of the anchorage. After a shallow start, the creek narrowed and deepened, winding through small mangroves. By standing up in the boat we could see across the vast tidal flats, threaded with shallow streams of pale water. Since it was nearly high tide, we didn't have too much difficulty, and we got almost to the other side of the island before hitting water too shallow for the outboard. We tipped it up and made it a little farther, then beached the boat and hiked through the two-inch deep lagoon to the ridge which separated us from Exuma Sound.
On the other side, waves crashed against a white beach littered with all sorts of interesting flotsam. Britt found a bucket in good shape, and a nice walking stick, and I found a lightbulb and an odd piece of finned plastic with screw threads on one end. We returned to the dinghy and took a side creek which branched off to the north just before the shallow lagoon, which took us to a deep cut on the Exuma Sound side. The cut made a beautiful pool, with the dark blue color of deep water. On the north side of the cut was the famous Camp Driftwood, which turned out to be a bit of a disappointment, but we left our found treasures there (except for the bucket) among the t-shirts, old fishing nets, plastic containers, sticks, and whatnot that previous cruisers had left.
We returned to our boat by continuing north on the side creek until it exited from the island near its north tip. At first, it made a big loop first to the north and then back east and south again, and it seemed like we'd gone the wrong way...then it looped back again to the north. It reminded us of our river-rafting days back in the west, meandering down slow desert rivers. Minus the rapids, of course. We checked out several coral patches on the way back for snorkeling potential, then rescued a few cruisers whose dinghy outboard had come down with a mysterious illness a few hundred yards away from the anchorage. (They had oars with them and weren't really in trouble, but they had to work to fight the current so they were happy to accept a tow.)
The next day we picked up Terry and Trish from Flirt and went out to snorkel at the coral patches we'd seen. None of the coral heads was very extensive, but each was quite beautiful and each supported a large variety of sea life. I saw more fringed tube worms than I'd ever seen before. They look like little flowers hanging on to the edge of a rock or coral, but if you wave your hand in front of them, they pull in their tentacles and close up tightly. One coral patch was riddled with holes and mini-caves, each of which held several huge lobsters. Too bad we were within the boundaries of the Exuma Land and Sea Park (more likely, that's the only reason we even saw any big lobsters) and couldn't grab any for dinner. Atlantic spadefish swam around one coral head, queen angelfish around another, and in the clear water between them floated little pulsating jellyfish the size of a child's fist. We returned to our boats shivering in the breeze, but happy to have had the privilege of spending a little time in that strange other world.
When we got back to the boat I was still feeling energetic, so I jumped back into the water with a scrub brush and a scraper. I cleaned all the barnacles off the prop (there weren't that many) and got a few of the big ones off the prop shaft, then scrubbed all the slime from the waterline. I'm sure this will contribute to an enormous increase in boatspeed! Well, at least it looks a whole lot nicer.