Exuma Land and Sea Park
21 February 2013 | Warderick Wells, Exumas, Bahamas
Donna
We spent Tuesday at Hawksbill Cay. We had a great sail there, with only one casualty – my baseball cap! It went overboard when I went forward to look for coral heads. I had finally found, and was using, the little strap to clip it on to my shirt. I guess that gave me the confidence to think I would not lose it. I was wrong! It went overboard with the cap. Bill offered to go back and get it. Baseball caps float very nicely. I refused. It wasn’t worth the effort.
Hawksbill Cay is a beautiful anchorage, Bill’s favorite so far. We started by taking a mooring ball. We were surprised to see that the line attached to it was way too big to bring on board the boat, you need to use your own line and put it through the eye of their line to use it. Once we had that all figured out we decided we preferred to anchor anyhow and moved off the mooring. It was an important lesson though, we were definitely taking a mooring the next day next to the park headquarters and we needed to be prepared.
There is a long trail you can hike at Hawksbill Cay that starts right off the beach. We remembered to use our dinghy wheels and they worked really well this time. Just the perfect combination of hard sand and experience helped. We were lucky enough to run into a couple on the trail that had actually helped to build it. They gave us a lot of local knowledge and made our time at Hawksbill Cay that much better. There are some Loyalist ruins on the island which we went and checked out. Loyalists were refugees from the American Revolution who were still loyal to the Crown and relocated to the Bahamas. Bill was looking for caves and he found some, but none of them were good to go in and explore.
Yesterday we reserved a mooring at Warderick Wells, the Exuma Land and Sea Park Headquarters. They have two mooring fields and we were lucky enough to get in the north field. The wind wasn’t great for sailing and we needed to charge our batteries so we motor sailed the whole way. We came into the mooring field and I was able to get Bill close enough to the mooring ball for him to grab it but the current was too strong and he had to drop it. We turned around, no easy feat in this small space, and came in against the current to pick up the mooring. We now know we should have done it that way to begin with. A cruiser we have met before and have been running into in a couple of anchorages jumped in his dinghy to come and help us. It worked better this time. Above is a picture of the mooring field. That light area you see on the inside is shallow water. That is the sand on the bottom you are seeing!
Warderick Wells has a lot of hiking trails and snorkeling. We took a great hike and saw how beautiful it is here. We met a woman on the boat next to us whose husband was having a bad allergy attack so the park helped him find a way to fly to Nassau to see a doctor. We invited her for dinner since she had no idea when he would be back. Luckily he got back in time for dinner and we all had a wonderful time comparing life stories. We will stay here at least another day and hike the much longer trail, hopefully it will calm down enough to snorkel some also.