On Saturday we left George Town and headed SE to Hog Cay Cut to visit a less-frequented island chain in the shallow banks south of the Exumas, called the Jumentos. They lead all the way down to Ragged Island (close to Cuba).


The 7-day Windfinder forecast was unexciting: winds very low for many days, with little to no sunshine. The good part of that is that the winds would not be on the nose and they were expected to "fill in" from the SE after a few days, so we could sail back. Also, Derek was getting cabin fever waiting around George Town for the weather to improve.

Few cruisers go to the Jumentos. The most direct route is via the Hog Cay Cut, which is around 2' depth at low water over a "hard bar" (rock, not sand), and then at least half a mile of 3' depth. So, stay away from low tides for this one. We anchored out at Elizabeth Island the night before, so as to get as close to high tide at the cut as we could without doing the first leg in the dark. As it was, the lowest we registered going through the cut was 0.5 feet below the keel, but that's enough to make me grit my teeth. It was a beautiful approach, though, and Saturday was only partly cloudy, so the sun shone on our endeavors occasionally:

Hog Cay Cut into Jumentos as seen from Sound-side

Our first stop was Water Cay. The wind was coming from an unexpected direction at that point, sort of NE, and that's not the best protection for the Water Cay anchorages... in fact, the southern one of the two was very unattractive, so we wound up anchoring at the northern anchorage to avoid the swells, near a bright red fishing boat with a white cabin superstructure. The local fishermen were sheltering from the rain when we got there.

The next morning they were using a smaller boat to go spear fishing, bringing the catch back to the larger boat. Derek also went spearfishing as an addendum to a snorkeling trip we took, and brought back a triggerfish. I made a creamy seafood chowder with it, which was very nice given the often-rainy weather. But then the wind died entirely for a while, although you could see that the weather was still gathering itself for something:

It did make the surface as clear as blue-tinted glass, though, which was fun for viewing! Once the fishermen pulled out, we had remoras around our anchored boat:

playful remoras

These were soon followed by nurse sharks, which liked to hang out near the dinghy:



One of the smaller remoras was trying to form a relationship with a nurse shark. That means attaching upside-down, though, since a nurse shark spends most of its time hanging out and hunting on the bottom:


We even had a young barracuda (3 feet or thereabouts) checking us out, patrolling around the boat, possibly for fish scraps:


That afternoon, after the small local boat was gone, a larger boat, Southern Style, with outriggers, pulled up to the coral bank for the night... apparently for several nights, actually. There's a small fleet of these hefty fishing boats, all named "Southern" something -- Southern Comfort, Southern Style...

Southern Style, a commercial fishing vessel, anchored of f Water Cay

The next day we enjoyed the cut in the middle of Water Cay that fills a natural pool on the banks side at high tide and dries at low. It was about the only sun we saw while in the Jumentos:

Exploring the shallow narrow cut through Water Cay

The natural sandy-bottomed pool on the banks side of that cut is a great place to bask:

Natural sandy pool at Water Cay cut

After that we headed to Flamingo Cay, a 2.5-hour trip south along the cays. It has a nice snug anchorage at the northern end called Two Palms (a beach between two rocky headlands, protected from N - SE but open to SW and W). It's the more northerly of the two "anchor" symbols on this chart:


Can you guess why they call it Two Palms?


The wind was still light when we got there, and Derek swam the anchor (in fact, he swam the whole anchorage, locating good holding in deeper sand closer to shore than we had originally thought to anchor). You can see that with the wind in the expected easterly orientation, we were happily facing the beach, with the rocky promontories on either side protecting us from stray swells:


So we were pretty snugly set when a 60-foot power boat ("20 Percent," hailing port Naples, FL, captained by Jeff with five guys aboard for fishing and diving) arrived and anchored in the next anchorage -- one beach south of ours, with a rocky point almost between us: we could see them because the wind was from the east. But then things got ugly: storm clouds gathered, lightning came more and more often, rain happened intermittently, it got dark, and the wind swung around to the SW. These anchorages are wide open to anything W of south. You do not want to be there for a strong westerly. We had a forecast, no westerlies were expected. So what we were seeing had put itself together in the last four days.

It was a bumpy night. Derek was not pleased that the wind was blowing strongly from an unprotected direction, blowing us toward a lee shore with a long fetch of open water to make waves rise. Through the night, although the other boat was behind the point from our new position (both of us now NE of our anchors rather than W of them as we swung on our anchor chains to face into the wind), their anchor light was some kind of comfort. We could see by the lightning flashes that although the surf was crashing against the rocky shore, our anchor was holding well. In the morning, I dinghied over to check with the other boat. Jeff had contacted his weather advisor in Ft Lauderdale by satellite phone, and was told the easterly trades should re-establish themselves over the next two days, with 15-20 kts by Thursday. So we stayed the day and explored Flamingo Cay -- there is an amazing cave at the south end of the second beach, inside a big humpy bluff that sticks out into the water and just looks like it might be hiding a cave!


It had a large overhang all around the edges:


Closer... you can see the entrance...

Entrance to the Flamingo Cay cave

And the light dawns!


Inside, it's so huge you can take a dinghy into it and hold a barbecue (or church service) for twenty, if that takes your fancy:

Dinghy in cave vestibule

You can see the conch shells previous visitors have used to decorate the walls and floor:


Derek speared two more fish, another trigger and a Nassau grouper. Delicious! He also brought back two large mature conchs. However, Grant made him return the conchs to the seabed, as Grant likes them and doesn't want to eat them. One of the conchs (the larger one) had a small fish hiding in its shell, a little like a brown-tinted goldfish. Apparently these are a species of small cardinal fish (astropogon stellatus) that has a commensal relationship with the queen conch. Here is an image of one from "Community Conch":


The next day we were going to stay and snorkel, but the weather was queer and not at all what had been forecast, with light winds but still very cloudy and a swell building from the south, and we began to get the uneasy feeling that it was time to get out of there. Don't ignore your feelings when it comes to weather, if you live on a boat. We started preparations to leave (pulling up the engine and mounting it on the engine mount on the stern rail, emptying the dinghy and lifting it onto the stern davits, cleaning and stowing everything that might get tossed around in a seaway: we were expecting it to be rough for the part where we had to go NE.

Jeff and his group took off for the reef on the north-facing side of Flamingo Cay, and about an hour after he left, he called us; we were finishing preparations for leaving. He said that it was far rougher than he'd expected and so he'd called his weather advisor again, and as a result he would be leaving the Jumentos and heading up to Little Farmer's Cay as soon as his divers came up. We told him we were leaving as well. When we left, the divers were still down, but with a powerboat that size, he was probably in Little Farmer's by mid-afternoon.

We covered in one day going north the distance we had covered in two going south. Our biggest concern was making it over the hard bar at Hog Cay Cut with possible waves. Fortunately, the cays sheltered the shallows and we never saw less than 6 inches of water beneath our keel. Yes, 0.5 feet. Told ya it was shallow...

Made it back to Elizabeth Harbour as the sun was setting, followed our GPS tracks as they had been laid down, to avoid coral. We picked up a mooring in a sheltered spot off of Chat 'n' Chill. Next morning we moved even farther in to avoid southerly swells.