South through the Exumas
10 January 2011 | Georgetown, Great Exuma
Captain Chris
The cook toasts our Christmas dinner, complete with pecan pie.
First, we hope everyone had a happy holiday season! We enjoyed our Christmas in the Exuma Land & Sea park. After leaving Nassau, we sailed back down to Highbourne Cay, then kept moving south in small hops. As we sailed, we watched the rigging and tightened anything that looked too loose when we had pressure on the sails, the "dynamic" part of tuning after ensuring the mast was straight when we were "static" in Nassau. Since our rigging is discontinuous, meaning there are adjustments up at the spreaders, I will need to go aloft to make some more fine tuning adjustments up there, but overall we're happy.
The transmission has leaked some fluid, so we're not really happy with that, but we're not going back to Nassau to complain, even if that would do any good. I've got a oil sorbent pad underneath it and fingers crossed that perhaps it's a break-in thing.
We've had two cold fronts come through, the first one was right after Christmas. We needed to get some protection from the strong west winds that were coming with the front, and there wasn't much where we were anchored. Not surprisingly, nobody had left the protection of the mooring field in the Land & Sea park, so no mooring balls were available for us. We wound up motoring back north about five miles to Norman's Cay and anchoring in the channel on the southeast end of the Cay with several other boats to ride out the strong winds. We had several beautiful anchorages after that, including the west side of Warderick Wells and Big Majors. Each sail was less than twenty miles, so we were able to get into the anchorage in early afternoon and enjoy our sundown drink and backgammon game.
After New Year's Day at Big Majors, we headed to Little Farmers Cay and then worked our way into a nice anchorage between Normans Pond Cay and Leaf Cay with protection from the second front as it blew through. We stayed an extra night there to tour the Perry Marine Research Center located on nearby Lee Stocking Island (Tours on Tuesdays and Fridays at 10 AM for those planning on passing through). The tour guide explained that they are busiest in the summer when professors and students are out of classes and doing their field work, but we saw the labs, coral culture tanks, and their diving operation, which included a recompression chamber, Nitrox fill station and tri-mix capability.
We left on Saturday the 8th to sail down to Georgetown, Great Exuma Island. This is a cruisers "mecca", where there are hundreds of boats scattered throughout a several mile stretch of sand beaches surrounding the town. We broke out the spinnaker to help with boat speed in the light winds, but when they died below five knots around two in the afternoon, we doused the sail and motored the last few miles to Conch Cut and then through the cut and down to "Hamburger Beach", where we anchored in time to enjoy a few beers with our friends on Flying Pig and Marionette.
We relaxed Sunday, and will be going into town this afternoon to get our first look around. We are not used to all this activity!
A shout out to our friends from Aquatic Adventures, on San Salvador about 100 nautical miles east of here. Enjoy the weather!