No Breaking Crests
06 January 2012
Green Turtle Cay - Man O' War Cay, Gt Abaco Island

We left Green Turtle Cay this morning bound for Man O' War Cay having waited several days for the Atlantic swells to subside following offshore bad weather hundreds of miles away.
You might wonder why on earth we were in the slightest bit concerned with weather patterns so far away but we needed to navigate the Whale Cay Channel, a shallow, rocky bar set between uninhabited Whale Cay and the Channel Rocks, which is adversely affected by wave action and which is the unavoidable route if one wants to get further down the island chain.
The entrance is swept broadsides by the surge from the Atlantic but the hazardous thing about this passage is that it can smash you onto the bottom if you attempt it in the wrong conditions - wave height is crucial and there is a lot of water coming in fast, with depths shallowing from several hundred feet a few miles out down to only 10/15ft at the bar. Waves can treble in size as they hit the shallow and squeeze through the Channel into the Sea of Abaco - it causes unstable conditions for any boat.
It certainly looked forbidding from a distance - huge white breakers crashing onto rocks either side of the narrow channel throwing spume high into the air and a boiling mass of water seeming to extend right across its width.
As we got closer it was obvious there was indeed a wide passage through but still the breakers to left and right were awesome and we were now is 5/7ft swells - it was quite rolly but there were no breaking crests.
Alexia and the Captain were having a great time - I was praying that my breakfast would stay where it belonged - inside me!
It was comforting to pass a motor boat going in the opposite direction and to know we weren't alone......he was certainly rocking more than we were - we waived a cheery hello to each other and kept going.
We reach our anchorage at Man O War Cay about an hour later, dropping the hook in 7 ft of crystal clear water, 100 yards offshore from the narrowest part of the island, beyond which we can see the Atlantic rollers and hear the surf gushing onto the shore.
The Cay is only about 4 kilometers long and perhaps 100 metres wide and famous for superior boat building for over two centuries. The earliest settlers constructed ships as well as smacks.
Today, their heritage is the Abaco Dinghy, pictured here, and their art of sailmaking, necessary for those early ships, has evolved into a smart canvas business to supply sturdy bags for tourists that come to the island.