Crew Log for March 22nd, 2023
Trip Summary:
• Manjack Cay – Allans Cay
• Trip Distance of 20.5 NM, Total Distance To-Date of 3,229.4 NM
• Departed at 09h45, arrived at 14h00
We had a little excitement the night before when we realized that a sailboat, Imagine, was dragging anchor towards us. We eventually woke them and they successfully re-anchored. In the morning, we noticed that the super yacht also moved. We can only speculate, but they likely had to reset their anchor sometime during the night. It did gust up to 30 knots, but it was pretty comfortable given we were sheltered by Manjack Cay. We were very happy our anchor held.
It was a beautiful sailboat day. Sunny, a little cooler with 10 – 15 knot winds out of the north, gusting to 20 knots. Once we were off the anchor we rolled out the jib and had a nice sail in flat water, between Great Abaco Island and the outer cays, towards the Pensacola Cays.
We arrived at Allans Cay early in the afternoon. The Allans Pensacola anchorage is a beautiful horseshoe bay that provides excellent protection for everything other than westerly winds, which should be perfect for our brief stop here. There were already 7 – 8 boats here, including Mutual Fun, but we had no problem finding a spot to anchor. The holding was great.
The registration numbers on our dinghy had deteriorated in the sun and had started to peal off. Technically, since our outboard is less than 10 horsepower the dinghy doesn’t need to be registered, however there are two important reasons for doing it. First, the laws for any motorized boat differ from state to state. And while legally, I expect the laws of your home Province or State would dictate registration requirements, explaining that to over zealous state officials, is something we wanted to avoid, particularly in Florida, where over zealousness is the norm.
The other, perhaps more important reason for registering the dinghy, was to identify "it", if "it" ever decided to leave home in the middle of the night. It is pretty much a weekly occurrence, particularly in the Bahamas, for a dinghy to be found drifting away from "its" mothership. Surprisingly, when they are found, great effort is made to see it returned to the rightful owner. That said, we had also heard that in Nassau and other larger centers, people would steal the dinghy off the back of the boat if it wasn’t locked.
I had bought new numbers back in December in North Palm Beach and finally thought it best to get them on before we arrived back in Florida.
There were lots of other folks on the beach, including a lot of dogs and little kids. While I got to work replacing the registration numbers, Judy got to squeeze a few babies. There is no secret that we were missing our grandkids, a lot. We have never actually met our newest addition, so the opportunity to hold a few surrogate babies was a nice treat.
The parents of one of the babies had just arrived from the US. They were so excited to finally be in the Bahamas and hanging out on the beach. They apparently had sold everything they owned, and bought a 40 foot ketch that was reported to be a “turn-key boat”. It turned out they had to spend the next 3 months doing a US$50,000 refit on the boat. When they talked about the experience, the husband said “she forgets about the 50 grand and all the work and I forget about the pregnancy”. It was fun to see their excitement, although the practical side of me wondered how this was going to work. We wished them luck and squeezed their baby one last time.
We also met a couple from Vermont who were travelling with 2 teenaged kids. He was an airline pilot for United and worked 6 months of the year and travelled on the catamaran for the other 6 months. He had brought a bunch of fireworks with him and had plans for a beach fire and a fireworks show that night. Since we got to bed at 20h00, we don’t know if it happened or not.
Now that my chores were done, we decided to take the path to the beach, before heading back to the boat. It wasn’t as entertaining as the “Art Trail” on Manjack Cay and did require a certain about of bushwacking, but it lead to a really cool swing that was right on the beach. Falling off would have been nasty however, given it arced out over jagged rocks.
We had a quiet evening, until about midnight when the anchor alarm went off. It is a rude way to get woken up. I checked our position and scanned the anchorage, but determined we were right where we were supposed to be. If I were to guess, our aging tablet has momentary memory losses and it losses the GPS signal. I’ve been known to loss my GPS signal a few times too, so for now, we’ll cut the tablet some slack.
This was our second to the last night in the Bahamas and was the last time we’d likely have an opportunity to get ashore. While our time on Allans Cay had been brief, we really enjoyed it. It was fun meeting people who were just starting their Bahamas adventure, given we felt like old experienced salts, but could still remember what it felt like to see the water color, feel the warmth and walk in the sand for the first time. Our brains however, have shifted into a different place and we were now focused on the return trip.
Our time in the Bahamas was more than we ever could have imagined. Sure, there were challenges, and we missed a lot of things from our former life. However, these two old grandparents from Truro Nova Scotia, on their tiny sailboat, just spent the winter in the Bahamas, an amazingly beautiful part of the world. We are not naïve enough to think our adventure was in any way unique. Lots of other people, of all ages, had done the same thing. However, some day I am sure we will look back at this adventure with a certain sense of pride at what we accomplished together. In the meantime, we still had several months of adventure ahead of us, as we make our way back up the US east coast and around Nova Scotia. But before that happens, we had one last giant hurdle.
We had checked, rechecked and checked again the weather for the next few days and the forecast still looked good for our crossing. Our plan, was to head to Great Sale Cay in the morning, where we would stage for our crossing back across the Gulf Stream to the US.
But more about that, next time.
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