Years before we embarked on this extended voyage, a couple who owned a large new sailing yacht at North Point Marina told us (based on what they described as “years of sailing and diving in the Bahamas”) that we would never be able to get our sailboat out to the reefs for SCUBA diving. They said that unless we had something like a big Zodiac with a 15hp outboard, “you just can’t go diving”. A sailing (and scuba-diving) couple we met at Vero Beach, Florida who said they live on their boat at Man-O-War Cay for months every year, told us the same thing. “you need a big inflatable dinghy with a 20hp outboard to get out to the reefs.”

Well, we don’t have a big inflatable with a big motor. Instead, we have a little 8 foot Dimples with her 2hp. outboard.

So the question was, could we navigate Les Miserables into a place where we could anchor among the coral reefs and explore some of the great dive sites of the Bahamas?

It turns out that we can. We left Marsh Harbor, hoisted all sail and had a fast passage at speeds up to 6.4 knots, through crystal clear water across the Sea of Abaco into the North Man-O-War Passage, then out toward the Atlantic, then headed back to a gap in the reef that lies behind Fowl Cay and the outer reef on the Atlantic side.

It helped that the seas on the passage were maybe 2 feet! We had listened to the “Cruisers Net,” an informal broadcast done by cruisers themselves at 0815 every morning on weather, sea state, community events, local business “promos” etc. The report on North Man-O-War was that “you could do the passage on a shingle, it’s so smooth”! After hearing this, we had the anchor up and were underway within the hour.

In avoiding a collision with a reef or rock as we made our way around various of them and into an area of sand near a dive site called “French Grunt Alley” we relied on Fernando, our faithful chartplotter GPS, and the keen eyes of Merry, up in the bow pulpit “reading the bottom”. We approached the reef we would be diving on under slow power, and when Merry yelled that we were “three boat lengths” from the reef, we dropped the anchor in 40 feet of water, set it, put up our “Diver Down” flag, put on our wetsuits and scuba gear and jumped in.

It turned out that we were about a football field from the reef after setting anchor, but this presented no problem, and we swam to the reef, let the air out of our BCs (buoyancy compensators) and submerged to explore a healthy reef full of colorful tropical fish. We saw huge schools of royal blue chromies, French Angels, Parrot fish, and lots of Damselfish, each guarding its little personal patch of rock or reef. There was no surge and little current. After 62 minutes of bottom time we surfaced because Merry felt a bit cold, inflated our BCs and swam back to Les Miserables. We didn’t see anything large - no big green moray eel, no sharks, though Merry did see a large curious Barracuda hanging outside the reef watching us. By 4:30 we had the tanks and scuba gear stowed and were underway, and we sailed to Man-O-War Cay, where we cautiously entered the narrow channel and picked up a mooring in the South Harbor near our friends Barbara and Merle’s boat Endurance.
This was one more time that little Les Miserable did what people had told us we couldn’t do.