What a great sail today. In short we left Nassau (awesome in itself) and sailed a sweet downwind reach in less than 2’ers.. we outran a big catamaran (horizoned him) we got so far ahead we couldn’t even see him. Current was with us all day.. and – we didn’t break anything! We got to Norman’s Pond early so we needed to wait on the tide to rise to enter so we beached SYL in the Southern bay behind the “whales tail”. We found sand dollars around the boat then got our magic erasers out and cleaned around the water line of the boat… Finally.. we are doing the SYL thing wading around the boat in shallow sandy waters in the Exumas!!! We trolled a lot but didn’t catch anything, that was the only missing link in the otherwise perfect day.
Mike and Laurie opted to keep Jumanji in Nassau for the blow. I know we surprised them this morning when we decided to pull out. We had discussed us going ahead earlier but our decision to actually leave happened about 7AM and we left at 7:30 so there wasn’t much time to talk about it with Mike. We topped off with fuel and floated by Jumanji to let them know we were heading out.
It’s less than 50 miles from Nassau to the best hurricane hole in the Bahamas.. Norman’s Pond. Our track took us direct to Highborn Cay where we passed through the Exuma chain from the West side to the deep ocean East side that allowed us access to Norman’s Pond entry. Sea Yawl Later did a great job today, I can’t say enough about how much Jono and I enjoyed the sailing and soaking in the beautiful blue beach just outside the entrance to Norman’s Pond.
If you watched “spot” our tracker… today we did some weird things. Most of the wobbling around was us fishing in and out of the deep water east of the Exuma chain at the prime fishing spots around 120 foot deep. With winds out of the West I put Jono ashore to hunt the normally unreachable eastern shore of Long Cay. Prevailing winds are from the SE so these outside beaches almost never see calm water…. but they are today! He came back with some fine treasures while I worked back offshore and did some fishing. Jono found a fishing float, some nice netting and line to add to the dinghy brow, a vase sponge and some cool shells. Unfortunately no Ambergris yet…
We worked our way into Norman’s pond just as the flood tide began, we knew it was rising fast so if we got stuck in the sand anywhere.. and we did. It wouldn’t be hard to back away, so after two or three slow easy groundings we made it in! Spot should show our new location, we found a great protected hole from the north and east… so we are golden for the next frontal passage. There are some dinghy-able beaches inside Norman’s. Even if we hole up here a couple days we have something to go explore.
The sun is low but still up, we are tucked in nicely after the best day of the argosy so far…. Easily our best day. SYL.. Rusty