Away from the Abacos
13 February 2015
• Royal Island
by Mike
Jeazus, shit! A night beating the crap out of the fender boards! Not the end of the world and nothing to say too much wrong about this place but GOD DAMN! The fender boards are doing their job as are the fenders that are supporting them but holy god damn they are working hard in these conditions. I was up several times during the night to adjust them, add fenders and check the lines as the tide rose and fell. At 0100 a security guard came over to check on me as he could probably see my flashlight moving about on the docks. Nice to see that they have security and he was able to tell me that the conditions that we were experiencing were unusual. Afterwards I realized that I was running about on the dock in the dark clad only in my tidy whities so I'm not sure what that guy thought about me, but as I haven't been locked up as a pervert or something I guess he understood.
I finally got the fender boards positioned so that the boat wasn't kicking the crap out of the dock and vice-versa and was able to get a few hours of fitful sleep. In the morning we got up and walked the dog over to the harbour inlet so that we could see what the situation was out there. Still large swells coming in but nothing like what we have navigated the night before. We decided to treat ourselves to a breakfast at the Dockside Cafe which was very nice, made even better by the several conversations that we had with the staff who only had us to deal with. Bahamians are, in general, such really nice people, you can't help but want good stuff for them. If this fishing club development is a success it would really be a shot in the arm to the local community.
We set off at 0820 and as soon as we hit deeper water I rigged my Cuban reel to see if we could catch anything. All day we motor sailed along and nothing, then, about two hours out of our final major waypoint we hit a small mahi-mahi which I managed to land. I figure that it probably weighed fifteen pounds which resulted in about three pounds of meat for our freezer. We would have had it tonight but Marcia had already thawed out some wahoo for diner so we will eat this one sometime later in the cruise.
But the big news - we are in the Eleuthera's! Specifically, we are anchored at Royal Island just outside of Spanish Wells along with six other boats in a wonderfully sheltered anchorage with so so holding due to grass on the bottom. I think we are going to be picked in well, especially after a few hours of a ten to fifteen knot wind with no seas, working the anchor in. The Bahamas is a fascinating country, a nation on an archipelago with several distinct sections each very different from the others: Bimini, Grand Bahama, Andros, the Berries, the Exumas, the Eleutheras, the Abacos, and New Providence. Bimini with Alice Town, the Abacos with Abaco Island and all the out Islands, New Providence with the capital Nassau. The Abacos tend to be Sandy whereas the Eleutheras seem to be made up mostly of coral from what we have seen so far. For a small country geographically there is quite a diversity.
Comments