Just a quick note to let you all know we've landed in the Bahamas! We've just dropped anchor in a temporary spot, Rum Cay (love the name), as an overnight rest stop because we could not make it to George Town, Great Exuma, Bahamas in daylight hours. While not the best anchorage as it has some swell from the ocean, it has good holding and was convenient. It has just a small 70 person population and no customs officer so we cannot check into the Bahamas here, nor go ashore. We've raised our yellow quarantine flag and are required to stay on the boat.

We had to pick our way in around a few coral heads and will find our way out early tomorrow following the track we've created on our chart plotter. We have a 55 nm run tomorrow to George Town where we can check into the country. We know the winds will rise as the day proceeds and very high winds come by tomorrow evening so the goal is to be well anchored by then.

The trip was a mixed bag of slow to start, rain storms the first day, high winds and fairly high waves with lots of breaking tops the second day, reminding us of the Madeira trip. The up side of that was we made really fast progress, which allowed us to get ahead of big thunderstorm cells the next day. Charlie (our wonderful weather router) was adamant about getting to a longitude 72 degrees in order to be safe from the storms. We pushed all Tuesday, a lovely sailing day, and all night to get at least close to that mark. We put our biggest sail out and assisted with the engine at times, sailing as fast as possible. Early Wednesday morning we saw the building storms and got caught in one downpour but escaped the growing ugly dark clouds. We were happy to have the very salty decks washed, and as we exited the storm, we heard a huge thunder clap and thanked our stars we did not see lightning and had come out the other side of the large system. We had pretty good sailing from that point on to our current anchorage.

We also had a few visitors come and spend the night with us! A cute little barn swallow was so cold, he stayed by us, ignoring all our movements and noise of sail changes happy to be out of the winds and storms. Another noddy tern chirped from the back of the boat. Both flew away in the morning.

Thank you for all the encouragement! One more longer trip when we head back to the US.