Hope Town
19 April 2018 | Hopetown from the Lighthouse
We have always heard that Hope Town was a lovely settlement and looked forward to a visit. Similar to Man-O-War, Hope Town has a completely surrounded "pond" with one inlet that is again only passable in high tide. There is no anchoring in the harbour, only moorings and they are always packed. We left Man-O-War and went across the Sea of Abaco to anchor for one night in Marsh Harbour. Mostly a quick trip to the bank, and treat Diana to dinner out at a small local restaurant she wanted to try. As always, you never really know what to expect, and as we got ready to leave brought up our anchor and found we had snagged an old sea anchor from the bottom of the harbour. The anchor was huge, and to complicate matters has chain and lines that wrapped around our anchor. Our windlass struggled to even bring it up. With a lasso I was able to catch the old anchor and lift it off, but the chains and lines were still wrapped around ours, it appeared either I would need to dive it, or get a local diver to come out and get it unwrapped at the bottom with the tension off the lines. Lucky for us, sailors are good Samaritans. An Austrian, anchored next to us saw what was happening and offered to come over to help. With him on a dinghy to wrap a line individually around each of the old anchor lines, I was able to pull it up enough so he could push it aside from our anchor. Many thanks later, and a few stories, we were once again free to move on to Hope Town.
The winds were light but we had a very nice sail again across the Sea of Abaco toward Hope Town. We were arriving just after low tide, so planned to anchor outside and wait till high tide in the morning to go in and see if a mooring was available, As we approached the anchorage in about 6 ft of water we passed by a boat with a 6'6" draft hard aground waiting for the tide to come up. We decided not to press our luck getting in further and anchored in 6 ft of water with a giant star fish just off our starboard side.
Hope Town is known for its candy striped lighthouse, the only working kerosene lighthouse in the world. It sits high above the town and the mooring field and can be seen form miles around. You can walk to the top for a spectacular view !
Hope Town is a charming settlement with a close quartered complex of narrow streets lovely cottages, shops and restaurants. We took the dinghy in a number of times over two days where the Hope Town Sailing Club has provided a public dinghy dock right in the middle of town. They have a Saturday morning farmers market where we were pleasantly surprised at the variety available.