Jacky's Log - February 2007
Miami - Bahamas - Turks & Caicos
From now on we would be sailing generally south east, right into the prevailing winds – a problem for a sailing boat. Many boats sailing from the US to the Caribbean take off from some point on the east coast, head towards Bermuda and then turn south to the Caribbean, avoiding the hard slog which lay ahead of us. In the days of sail our route was known as the ‘Thorny Path’ and was rarely taken by trading vessels.
For us it meant using tactics: understanding the weather patterns which might lessen the strength of the prevailing winds or bring us winds from a better direction. The variable daily heating and cooling of land mass and sea could also be used in our favour. It was like a long game of chess, with the SE wind as our opponent. To help us in the game of strategy we had a very reliable weather service, Chris Parker, who broadcasts on SSB radio very early in the morning. 
His broadcasts are freely available but by paying to become a sponsoring vessel it is possible to ask him specifically for information about your own proposed route. Mike subscribed to this before we left. And like most cruisers in the area, we referred constantly to Bruce van Sant’s guide. ‘The Gentleman’s Guide to Passages South – the Thornless Path’ in which he describes a whole new approach of sailing painlessly to windward.
Another feature of this part of our trip was the very shallow water we would need to negotiate crossing banks up to 100 miles wide but only a few meters deep. At the edge of such banks the sea bed often plunges to over 2 km deep within seconds, the drop-off providing the good diving walls and varied fishing for which this area is famous.
Add to this the hazards of reefs and coral heads, the majority uncharted, just below the surface, depths shifting and unreliably charted so that they have to be recognised by the colour of the water and you have the picture of our new sailing grounds. Pic 0686
Needing good, high sunlight to spot dangers in the water, we had left South Bimini at 1600 but could not enter Chub Cay, our destination, until after 1030 for the same reason, so we some hours to kill in the darkness. We anchored on the Great Bahama Banks in what was, in effect, the middle of the sea with no land visible, in just 3m of water, lit the anchor light, cooked supper, went to sleep and then set off again about 2300.
At night the shallow Banks act like land masses, giving off the heat they absorb during the day, thus calming the winds to something manageable – the night lees which play such an important part of Bruce van Sant’s strategy.
Soon after breakfast the next day we passed the Northwest Channel Light which, like every light we came across over the next few weeks, no longer functioned but stood as a hazard to shipping at the edge of the deep waters of the Tongue of the Ocean. It was a relief to not hear the depth alarm going off intermittently and to know that we had more than a kilometer of water under our keel for an hour or two.
Chub Cay is at the southern end of the Berry Islands, has a new marina and is set about with reefs and coral heads. We managed to anchor safely between the Cay and the Mamma Rhoda reef, moving to the marina the following day to shelter from the forecast high winds.
Here we discovered our first real Caribbean beach – turquoise water and a long sweep of white sand fringed by swaying palm trees. We swam, walked and shelled. Mike discovered the joys of Pina Colada, I ate my first conch (pronounced ‘conk’) fritters and sure enough the wind blew . (pic beach 0500)
When the wind stopped blowing a couple of days later we set off for Nassau. We were reluctant to hit civilisation in such a big way, but it lay in our path and Mike had decided he really needed an outboard motor on the dinghy. Anchoring some distance offshore in these shallow waters was obviously going to be the pattern of things for quite some time and an outboard would make life easier.
Approaching New Providence, the Atlantis Resort building on neighbouring Paradise Island was visible from miles away. The busy channel between Paradise Island (an island of resort hotels) and Nassau has poor holding, strong currents and lacks security, so we opted for a night at the Nassau Yacht Haven where we tied up next to Nigel Calder’s brother, Chris!
We found a good Yamaha store almost across the road and Mike decided on an outboard and we bought it the next day. I bought a small anchor so that we could use the boat for snorkeling. We managed to do a little food shopping and caught a bus into the centre of Nassau. It was easy to imagine what it had been like in its hey day: pretty houses with verandahs, balconies and gardens and an attractive shopping street, but it was not thronged with people offloaded from the big cruise ships tied up beside it, buying duty free jewellery, drink etc.
Happy to leave this urban environment, we moved on eastward that afternoon out of the channel to a peaceful anchorage on Rose Island which would give us a head start on our dawn departure for the Exumas. Mike took the dinghy out for her maiden voyage as a motorised vessel!
The Exumas are a long chain of cays which trail southwards, some inhabited, many not, some very small, some with navigable cuts through from the shallow waters of the west to the deep Exuma Sound on the east. We crossed the shallow Exuma Bank in good light, spotting the shallows and the coral heads as we went.
On the Yellow Bank the depth is only 0.9m in places and we were crossing in a below LAT low tide!
We anchored on the west side of Allans Cay at the northern end of the chain because the beautiful, shallow, turquoise anchorage on the east side, protected by Leaf Cay and SW Allans Cay already contained several boats and we needed a good choice of deeper water.
We motored through in our dinghy, first to a little beach on Allans Cay meeting some of its wild life before going off to SW Allans Cay in search of bigger prey.
It is home to some very special iguanas.
We expected to have to look hard for them but they were everywhere along the high water or striding in their prehistoric fashion through the brittle undergrowth. Some of them were quite fiercesome and I would have liked them better if they had run away from us instead of continuing on towards us!
The next day, 22nd, the wind was to go north and we planned to take advantage of this rarity. At midday we set off slowly and carefully and in good light through the narrow, winding channel of slightly deeper, darker water which would take us through the cut into the deep waters of Exuma Sound. We held our breaths and managed it. We said goodbye to the Exumas, left the long, stretched-out islands of Eleuthera and Cat Island to the east to be explored another time and headed for deep water and our 140 mile passage to Rum Cay.
We sailed poled-out during most of the afternoon and on a reach for much of the night . Night sailing was becoming warmer as we were making our way southwards.
We took 2-hour watches under cloudless and very starry skies with empty seas and phosphorescence in the bow waves. I snoozed on deck, setting the kitchen timer to wake me every 15 minutes or so. It was a lovely and memorable night.
The following morning we passed Long Island on our starboard side, Conception to our port and not long after saw the sandy point of Rum Cay on our bow.
We headed for Port Nelson – hardly a port since it’s only dock was a short jetty for the mail boat, and not even a town since it had only a scattering of houses and not much else.
But it did have a long white beach fringed with Australian Pines (which are not even pines), clear turquoise water and a charming atmosphere, enhanced by the Caribbean music drifting across to us from two competing sound systems. We had arrived on ‘Rum Cay Day’.
After a swim and a rest, we dinghied ashore to explore.
We went to Kaye’s café for lunch, passing through the bar with its floor of sand and into the little dining room. I asked at the kitchen door if we could have lunch, we were shown a table and within seconds two plates were put in front of us – the meal of the day!
One turned out to be fish with very tasty rice and beans and the other meat – possibly goat – rice and beans. We began to fall into the rhythms of ‘island time’.
We explored the little provisions shop which contained a curious mixture of products but understandably almost nothing fresh.
Some time ago we had given up trying to buy bread and biscuits (Mike needs a steady supply of these to keep him going) and I had been making soda bread successfully with a recipe and cakes/biscuits less successfully without.
We called them boat cakes as this was suitably vague and gave no indication of how they were really supposed to turn out. They were a cross between a scone and a rock cake and different every time . Eventually they improved and my final lime drizzle cake was a true pièce de résistance!
On Sunday mornings, when we didn’t have to be up and writing down weather forecasts at 0630, we had American pancakes for breakfast for which I did have a recipe. Once, Mike even found blueberries to have with them – the ultimate!
We spent a couple of relaxing days at Rum Cay, swimming, walking along the beach, lazing and planning the next long hop – and all the while waiting for favourable weather.
From here onwards the sailing would be different. In the Out Islands (the extreme SE Bahamian islands) there are fewer anchorages, and those there are are only protected in certain wind and sea swell conditions.
The area is exposed to large swells from the North or East which may take a day or two to subside after a storm way out in the Atlantic. Many cruisers turn back at this point and head back north, seeing only long passages and few bolt holes ahead.
A weather window was approaching though there seemed to be some doubt about when the wind would turn more northerly.
We set off having planned for a landfall in either Mayaguana or Plana Cays to the south east where anchorages might turn out to be too exposed. If these were untenable we had the option of Atwood Harbour on Aklins Island, which was protected but not as far east as we wished to be.
However, we were delighted that in the early hours of the morning we had decided on Atwood Harbour. It turned out to be our most beautiful anchorage, though again its name is misleading .
It is not a harbour in the bricks and mortar sense, but a wide horseshoe of pure white sand enclosing shallow water entered through offshore reefs marked by lines of breaking waves and guarded by an umbrella shaped rock and a derelict navigation light. The only signs of man are two small white buildings which seemed to be abandoned.
Aklins and neighbouring Crooked Island make up three sides of a square enclosing the Bite of Aklins.
This shallow lagoon is home to a large population of pink flamingos. Sadly, we didn’t see any of them and it would have been nice to stay a day or two, sail the long way round into the Bite and explore. But to do so would have taken us in completely the wrong direction and we had only a day or two before the weather was to worsen.
As the sunset we had a long walk along the beach to a little creek. The air was luxuriously warm and the white sand washed golden by the sun. During the night we had crossed the Tropic of Cancer and were now well and truly in the Tropics.
It was almost the end of February and the next leg of our journey was to take us to the Turks and Caicos, a group if islands to the south-east which are still a Crown Colony. Apart from Providenciales (‘Provo’) it is largely undeveloped.
We left at 0800 for Sapodilla Bay, Provo, a port of entry. When entering a new country and before clearing in, it is normal to fly a yellow flag – the Q flag. Once the paperwork is done, boats fly the courtesy flag of that country. It can become expensive buying flags for just a few days, so I made them by hand as we sailed along. Flown high, it is amazing what stitchery you can get away with!
We had a good mixture of sailing and motor sailing and decided to go north of Plana Cays and Mayaguana, passing them in the afternoon and early evening. Just before we turned south east past Mayaguana, the skies behind us darkened, we reefed as the wind strengthened and soon we were being chased by violent thunderstorms, the sky lit up by lightning all around the stern of the boat, the seas building and the wind blowing harder still. It was, of course, night by then and things always feel worse at night. We turned south-east towards the Caicos bank and things were no better. The steep waves came in rapid succession and though Gypsy Dancer rocked steadily over them like the stout old lady she is, she had often not become upright again before a wave came flying over her quarter and into the cockpit. I had just decided I would leave her to it and go below away from the waves and the lightening and only come up on deck from time to time, when I suspected the waves were coming over less frequently. And they were.
The waves became more regular and manageable and the lightening died down until by 0400 we were having a pleasant enough sail. We were never entirely sure what the problem had been. Had we cut the corner too finely and experienced our own little Portland Bill at the eastern tip of Mayaguana? Was the north-going current so strong that we had violent wind-over-tide effect? Had the weather forecast been wrong? Two boats we came to know well later, Shian and Caribbean Soul, had been a couple of hours in front of us and had been equally surprised. Chris Parker apologised the next day for not anticipating the conditions. I think, in fact, it was probably a mixture of all three. We would treat corners with more respect in future.
We found the Sandbore Channel which would lead us onto the Caicos Bank very easily, the waves breaking over the reefs to either side of the entrance guiding us in. The wide channel ran dark blue through the turquoisy-green shallow water on either side of it. Bruce van Sant’s advice is to cross the bank at dawn before the night lee has broken and the winds of the day raise a chop.
We were there at dawn and found it already breezy and choppy. The sun came up directly in our eyes. Once out of the Channel we had a further 10 miles to Sapodilla through areas cluttered with uncharted coral heads and shallows, so we decided to wait for better light, dropped the anchor, had a good breakfast, showers and a rest.
Feeling more human after the ravages of the night before and with the sun high in the sky, we enjoyed our slow journey dodging coral heads, me on the bow and Mike scanning from the wheel.
Sapodilla Bay was not the best of places and we were delayed by unfavourable wind directions in that very rolly anchorage longer than we would have wished. The busy dock, a port of entry, was nearby and the water was not especially clean so we did not swim. Provo had undergone rapid and haphazard development.
However, we met Ann and Graham on their catamaran, Chi, and spent a couple of pleasant evenings with them. Mike and Graham discovered they both had a newly kindled interest in quantum theory – Mike was reading an interesting book and Graham had a DVD on the subject, ‘What the Bleep do we Know – Down the Rabbit Hole’. We watched it together on Gypsy Dancer one very hot evening. It is a subject hard for the layman to get his mind around and I think it possible that none of us quite succeeded.
Graham lent us his bike so the two of us could go off across the island to the marine store for boaty bits, charts of the Dominican Republic and food. In the end, we cycled right across the island on hot and dusty roads, mostly uphill. At least it was mostly downhill on the way back but was still hot and dusty. It was quite hard to tear myself away from the air conditioning of the supermarket. The only highlight, apart from a good lunch at Turtle Cove Marina, was seeing the enjoyment Mike gave to passing islanders as he rode his rusting bike with its frantically wobbling back wheel.
Mike was keen to get rid of the bike as it cluttered up the deck and Graham kindly agreed to take it off his hands, though I don’t think he really knew why!