After weeks of tide-ripped, inlet hopping down the Georgia and Florida coasts, and before we got tainted by the extreme wealth of West Palm Beach, not to mention its politics, finally the wind turned from easterly with its on-the-nose windward bashing to a more favourable direction, giving up-yer-chuff sailing and a quick scoot across the Gulf of America Stream to West End in the Bahamas.

Now, in our travels we've "cruised"the Bahamas three times and in case of doubt, that's cruising, in Time Bandit, gotta-press-on style. On two of these visits we were intentionally just passing through rather than cruising, "yellow flagging" it's known as, a.k.a. hiding out from customs and immigration.

In 2012, we spent all of two weeks dashing through the five hundred mile long chain of around seven hundred islands, seeing only a handful and, at that, getting just a passing glimpse. The islands sit on a limestone shelf that is the platform for the Turks and Caicos and Bahamian archipelagos, an area eleven times the size of Belgium but with fewer shops. None of this expanse of sea is more than a few metres deep and much of that is in the one to two metres range. "Shallow draft and VPR rules apply". Initially I thought VPR was something to do with how visible your underwear was but in fact it is Visual Pilotage Rules where one is required to stand on deck or halfway up the mast looking for shallow bits and rogue coral heads. For miles there are coral-head-infested areas waiting to spoil the day of the unwary by snapping off a dagger board or biting a big chunk out your keel.

Having been brought up sailing in the deep, inky black waters of the West Coast of Scotland, and despite a good few miles in tropical, shallow, light blue, reef infested waters, thrashing around here, at speed, with dagger boards just one third down, (and we can still outpoint the Condomarans) we're nervous, feeling vulnerable in the event of a newly relocated sandbank or, worse, an uncharted coral head, it doesn't make for relaxed cruising.

Unless you're in a charter boat that is.

Here's what some of it was like in moving pictures!