Now I understand why no one takes the Bight of Abaco route. Not that it was bad, it wasn’t. We got up before sunrise and headed out to complete the Bight and head north. After the sun rose and we had been underway for a while we heard someone call us on the VHF radio. Well, actually they called “Sailboat going north on the Bight of Abaco”. No question here, that was us. We answered and found it was a sailboat we had talked to in Hatchet Bay. They were off our starboard side and a bit further back. We had heard they were going to take this route too because they had to be in Marsh Harbour by Saturday. They are cruising with a two year old and a six month old baby! Bill and he chatted a bit over the VHF and then discussed the real reason why everyone was still sitting in Spanish Wells waiting for the right weather. When you leave the Bight of Abaco and head over to the Sea of Abacos you have to go through a very shallow area that is four feet at low tide. Our boat has a five foot draft, as did the other boat. We both planned to go through at just about high tide so we would not run aground. Bill offered to go through the shallow area first since our keel would handle a grounding better than theirs. I think we have better navigation equipment too, not to mention that Bill and I were communicating over our headsets while Bill was checking his charts on the laptop and also going forward to check the color of the water to see where the shallows were. They followed us through and everyone made it out safely. It was a bit nerve wracking, but not dangerous or scary.

So now we are on the “popular” side of the Abacos. We aren’t quite to the exciting towns yet but we are going to be able to get to most of them before we have to leave the Bahamas and head home for a visit. We are anchored outside of Fox Town. It’s a big enough town that we are able to borrow someone’s Internet but we chose not to bother going into town to check it out. We had to go by these huge rocks before we got to the anchorage. The chart says Obstn – for obstruction. Yes, I would think so. The picture above shows just one of the rocks.

Tomorrow we are hoping to get to Marsh Harbour which is in the south part of the island and then work our way north from there.