The infrequently-visited Jumentos trail out like stepping stones between Great Exuma and Cuba. Not a lot of cruisers go through here. One obstacle that keeps people away is that the direct route from George Town passes through Hog Cay Cut, which has a low-tide depth of only 3 feet. There's about a 3-foot tidal range, though, and the full moon on the 20th would give us higher than usual high tides; the plan was to sail there in the afternoon, anchor for the night, then slide through the cut on the next morning's high tide (conveniently scheduled for about 9 a.m.).
We did a few final errands in George Town, refilling our dinghy gas cans (at nearly $3/gallon!) and doing one more load of laundry, then headed out the eastern entrance of Elizabeth Harbour. The strong easterlies made for an uncomfortable ride as we got tossed around on the large swells. The seas broke heavily on all the reefy areas, so things were a bit scary looking, but we followed our waypoints out and soon got inside a line of rocks and reefs which provided a bit of protection.
Anchoring near the cut was an unpleasant exercise. Our anchors wouldn't even begin to set, as the bottom was scoured almost everywhere. The only places with nice sandy bottoms were too shallow for us. It was just about dead low tide, so almost everything was on the shallow side, and we scraped bottom a few times as we tried half a dozen different spots. Whish had left George Town about an hour after we did, but we were still trying to get ourselves set when they showed up.
We finally anchored in the scoured entrance to the cut by running our anchors out by hand in the dinghy. One went out about 200 feet, into a patch of sand in 2 feet of water, and Britt wedged the other behind a rock in the center of the channel. Another boat, Shanty, set theirs similarly; Whish, with their shallower draft, found a sandy spot deep enough for them. As it turned out, the sandy spot had great holding but a killer surge, so they rocked and rolled all night and got little sleep. We slept nervously, since our hooks were only marginal, but we didn't rock nearly as much. Way out on the other side of the cut, we could see a fourth boat anchored in the open water.
In the morning, we talked on the VHF with the others. The boat anchored out beyond the cut drew under four feet, so they were going to come through the cut at a little better than half tide. Shanty drew just over four, so they planned to watch the other boat come through and then go themselves. Jeff and I went out in a dinghy to watch and to take a few soundings with the lead line.
The route through the cut isn't an obvious channel, like most of the other cuts we'd done; in fact, you have to leave the deep water and deliberately head for the shallows, because the deep water channel peters out into even shallower stuff. And forget buoys; the only aid to navigation is a natural back range formed by a palm tree and a bush. The flow of the current helped show the pathway, but it also pushed the other boats around a lot, so we decided to forgo that particular "aid to navigation" in favor of slack tide.
Ten minutes before high tide, we started the laborious process of pulling in our anchors. Britt was still sorting out the mess on the foredeck when I turned toward the cut. I looked over my shoulder to line up that palm tree and bush; of course, there were about three different bushes in front of the tree, and it wasn't until I got them lined up that I was sure I was using the correct one. One eye on the depthsounder, one eye looking back at the range, I didn't even have a chance to look ahead until, after 200 feet of heart-in-mouth slow motoring, the depth finally crept back above 7 feet. The lowest I saw was 6.4', a foot more than our draft, so it wasn't really that bad, but I knew there were shallower bars on both sides, just waiting for me to slip up.
After getting through the cut, Whish and Windom both set sail and headed downwind. With 10-15 knots, Whish (a CS 36, lighter and more set up for speed) slowly pulled away from us over the 25 or so miles to Water Cay. We got back at them a few days later; during the downwind run to Buena Vista Cay in 20-25 knots, we easily outdistanced them in our heavy cruising machine.
We had caught a barracuda while trolling, but Britt and Jeff were hot to get into the water with their spears as soon as we anchored at Water Cay. We all piled into the dinghies and headed for the cut north of the cay, hoping that it would be as productive as some of the other cuts we'd dived. It turned out to be quite shallow, with very little coral, but there was still a huge profusion of fish. I counted nearly a dozen large triggerfish lazily swimming around. Jeff speared two of them in rapid succession; Britt decided he was going "shopping" for snapper, which provide a bigger challenge than triggerfish. (Triggerfish are sort of stupid. They swim slowly, approach divers at close range, and then turn and display their big round bodies to present maximum target area. They practically hang out signs saying, "Spear Me." If more people realized they were good to eat, there wouldn't be a single one left in the Bahamas.)
We left the cut and Britt and Jeff dove along the edge of the island while the rest of us drifted alongside in the dinghies. Each time a hunter held his spear aloft, a fish thrashing on the end, Donna or I would zoom up in the dinghy to retrieve the fish. The heads along the island were thick with mahogany snapper, and soon our buckets were full.
Back at the anchorage, we had a little more company. Namaste had gone through Hog Cay Cut a few hours after we did; Odyssey had left George Town a few days before us but taken the longer route via Long Island since they have a 6'6" draft. Shamal, who we hadn't seen since Florida, was on their way back to George Town after two weeks in the Jumentos (and said this was the first anchorage they'd had to share with other boats in the last ten days). Bob on Namaste had caught several yellow snapper and blue runners with a line, so the guys filleted all the fish and we had a big barbecue for the whole anchorage on the beach that night.
The next day Jeff and Britt went out to restock the larder, coming back with a red grouper, a small hogfish, and bunches of snappers. No lobster to be found anywhere, they reported, but there was a big pile of recently-picked carapaces just off the beach; we had seen a few Bahamian commercial fishing boats nearby, and figured they'd cleaned out the lobster population just before we'd gotten here.
While they dove for dinner, I swam around the anchorage just for fun, doing a few laps around the boat. The water was incredibly clear and beautiful, perhaps the clearest we've seen yet in the Bahamas. At one point, a huge school of bar jacks swam around me on all sides. When I returned to the boat, I got a scrub brush and worked on the bottom for a bit. When I'd scrubbed the waterline while anchored at Shroud Cay, the bottom had been smooth apart from a bit of slime; in the intervening six weeks, dozens of patches of grassy growth had sprouted like so many small gardens. The blades of the propeller were bearded as well, but I was happy to see they were at least free of barnacles.
We'd been listening to the forecasts with some nervousness; as far as we could tell, a front was either coming or not coming, and it either would or would not stall before it got to us, and the resulting wind shift might or might not go into the west. This was important, because the Water Cay anchorage is entirely unprotected from the west, and in fact in the whole Jumentos there are really only a few places which are comfortable in a frontal passage.
Most of the boats, including us, opted to chance it for another night, and everything was fine until about 6 a.m. the next day when the wind shifted to the northwest and quickly built to over 20 knots. The swells started pounding into the anchorage, making a sort of kinetic alarm clock as things rapidly got quite rough. We quickly decided, along with Odyssey and Whish, to make for a better anchorage at one of the cays further south. We'd skip a lot of islands, but we and Whish would be turning around at Ragged Island, so we could sightsee more on the return trip.
After a quick breakfast, we lifted anchor and motored west,
crashing and bashing right into the swells. Once clear of the
outlying reefs, we turned south and put up sails, and things got
steadier although it was still rough until we passed through the cut
south of Water Cay into the deeper water of the Crooked Island
Passage, and into the lee of the island chain. Actually, it was rough
even after we got on the east side of the islands, 6-8 foot seas with
several different wave trains converging from different directions,
but it really wasn't too bad. I even took a short nap.
The highest windspeed we saw was 32 knots, but mostly it was around 25. We sailed on a broad reach, practically downwind, making over 7 knots with both sails partially furled. The following seas were moving faster than we were, though, so every so often we'd get lifted up and forward by a wave, then slide down the back, which would first speed us up and then slow us down. At one point our GPS clocked us at an astounding 13.3 knots!
We all tossed lures out as soon as we got into the deep water. The final score was: Odyssey, two and a half barracudas; Windom, one and a half barracudas; Whish, one lure bitten off right through the steel leader. There must be something really, really big out there. Something hungry. With lots of teeth.
One reason the Jumentos are lightly visited is that the available charts are terrible. The Explorer charts of the Bahamas are very good (surprisingly so; we have found that you can just run waypoints with abandon, even though there are dire warnings all over the charts telling you not to), but there are no Explorer charts of this area. The Maptech charts, from Resolution Mapping Inc, are all that's available, and at 1:300000 there isn't enough resolution to do more than find the bigger islands. As a result, we rely heavily on Stephen Pavlidis's guidebook chartlets. They tend to be quite good, but (as we discovered) there are a few exceptions.
The day's original plan had been to check out Jamaica Cay first, which might have given us a good lee anchorage had the wind moved more northerly, but as we were making good time and the wind was still west of north, we pressed on toward Buena Vista Cay. The nearest pass mentioned in the guidebook was the Nurse Channel, quite a bit north of Buena Vista. Our Maptech charts show the Nurse Channel at a small scale, but don't have very detailed coverage of Buena Vista or the cays near it. (In fact, the chart shows two small islands off the southwest corner of Buena Vista Cay which don't exist at all!) Alex, in the lead, radioed us that he planned to cross back to the Banks side about a mile south of the island, just past a few small cays shown on the guidebook chartlet JU-10. I pulled out the book, turned to the chartlet, and saw a nice wide pass at latitude 22° 24'N. Great, right?
Then I turned to the next page, where chartlet JU-11 showed the area just to the south. The charts overlapped their coverage right around 22° 24'. But where JU-10 had showed a wide pass, JU-11 showed a island!
We called Odyssey and warned them to take a look at the discrepancy. Meanwhile, I worked with the chartlets and our one real chart, and determined that the second chartlet was probably the correct one. We could still pass south of the island, but it would be a narrower pass with some dangerous reefs to our lee side. Alex called back; they'd come to the same conclusion, but were willing to take the lead and let us know by VHF what they found.
As we approached the southern end of Buena Vista Cay, we could see the small cays and the island that was indeed there. Odyssey had been motorsailing, trying to match the speed of the wave trains for a more comfortable ride, so they doused sail and motored through the cut. It got much shallower than they expected, but only for a moment, and they radioed back that everything was fine. We reefed a bit more, since we'd be beam to the wind, and sailed through at a good clip. I had routed us so that we would pass closer to the north side of the pass, but as it turned out the reefs to the south were breaking and easily visible, so it wasn't too scary. We pulled in the sails and turned on the engine for the short but tough slog directly into the wind and up to the anchorage.
Of course, any skipper who tried to run strictly by GPS waypoints derived from chartlet JU-10 would quickly have noticed the island in the way, so this particular chart error isn't really a dangerous one. Even underwater reefs and shoals, with good sunlight and wave conditions, are easy to discern through the crystalline water of the Bahamas. But with wind-whipped seas, an uncharted and unmarked obstacle can go unseen until it is too late. The charts of the more-traveled areas are pretty good, but it's unrealistic to expect any mapper to find every single coral head and shallow patch.
This is all the more sobering as we have heard of two recent wrecks. While we were in George Town, a boat named Odyssey (another one, not the boat we've been traveling with) made an error entering Clarence Town, on Long Island, and was a total loss on the reef. This was all over the SSB and VHF nets, mostly because another boat, Hibiscus, apparently had offered to help salvage gear and then took off with the items they recovered. (They were later apprehended in George Town and the items were returned to their owners. It's possible there was a miscommunication or a misunderstanding of salvage law, and it's also possible that the information spread on the net was incorrect or misleading. But the general sentiment around the cruising community is decidedly against Hibiscus.) Then, just the day after our discovery of the chart inconsistency, we heard that Jubilation, a large sailboat we'd seen in George Town, was lost on a reef entering Mayaguana. This news hit our group of friends particularly hard as that boat had a girl about Mallory's age aboard, and they'd spent time in George Town together. No lives were lost in either wreck, but a lot of cruising dreams were destroyed.