Sailing Baby Blue

A much more pleasant dinghy sail than the one you may have read about previously. Walking the beach on the other side of Rock Sound after landing the dinghy. Beach trash cabana on Surfer's Beach in Eleuthera My mind is still boggled by the fact that the billions of tiny shells that cover this beach were once billions of living creatures. Entertaining myself while Jon waits for good waves Abandoned silo on Eleuthera Walking the rather dangerous highway before we were picked up by Anji & Chad! That giant bag would be Jon's surfboard. Barely visible is a tiny channel between cliffs and we're about to pass through it to Hatchet Bay. Here we go. Made it! Jon loves Cacti Goats! On their way to pick up the latest fashions. Pretty sure this is not a poisonwood tree. Thinking about snagging some bananas, but they were heavily guarded by wasps. Road to Hatchet Bay Caves

Another view of the sunrise as we sailed toward our first stop at Great Sale in the Abacos. The short-lived wing and wing stretch of our sailboat race to Green Turtle to check in with Customs and Immigration. Godspeed in the lead Pallid bust of Pallas Jon meets a historical figure from Green Turtle A motherload of sea glass covering one of the graves in the cemetery. Lovely roads The beach outside of Nippers, a bar we definitely would have patronized on Great Guana Cay, had it not been so cold that day. My first Bahamian beer.                   Trying to imagine myself in a Sandals commercial, again. Our boat outside of Hope Town on Elbow Cay. Our depth sounder was showing 4 foot depths as we left, and our draft is 5,  yet we didn't seem to be touching the bottom. A remarkably large sail on a very crowded little boat. The boom would actually be underwater part of the time. A f...

A high speed, maybe a little dizzying, walk through the caves of Eleuthera, followed by photos of me and some stalagmites.

After our failed attempt to make it to Allan's Cay as detailed in Jon's post, The Rage , we arrived without difficulty the following day to see the famous iguanas.

2/6/15 We were making little progress, desperately trying to beat to windward under heavily reefed sail. The current had turned against us and the only direction we seemed able to go was ever closer to the dark shadow and crashing waves of the reef.  We were sailing between islands making good progress when the wind began gusting and the seas very suddenly became confused and crashed over the bow. Was this one of the infamous "rages" we had been warned about? I decided to turn back and seek shelter in the lee of a nearby island. There was no time or sea room to take down the mainsail in the suddenly violent conditions. As we tacked a gust of wind and large wave caused us to broach and forced our starboard rail down into the sea.   A rush of water flooded into the cockpit. After a second and then third violent gust forced our rail under I could not believe the volume of water that was so quickly filling our boat.   The boat was feeling heavy and unresponsive fr...

1/14/15 We are now unofficially in the Bahamas. We moved up our planned 12am start time to a 6pm departure when we saw the parade of familiar boats moving toward the inlet, and Godspeed hailed to let us know the pack was heading out. (We had left the good anchorage the previous day in order to accomplish some tasks more convenien t to the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad anchorage and were out-of-the-loop.) We hastily conferred and decided we might as well get going too, so we made our last-minute preparations and were underway, slipping out of the Lake Worth Inlet as the sun went down, following the pack in stealth mode as we were too far behind to hail anyone on the radio.   Another "under the bridge" dinghy landing. Take me to the place I love - take me all the way.   Leaving Lake Worth Inlet. We encountered about 9 knots of wind from the north and a 2-3 foot easterly swell. Both nervous about entering the Gulf Stream, we stayed awake togeth...

Here's the long version of our surprise pig encounter on No Name Cay in the Abacos. Maybe someday these pigs will be as famous as the ones we saw yesterday at Big Majors in the Exumas.

After being in the Palm Beach area for two days shy of a month, we left for the Bahamas on January 13th. Why did we spend a month in the port that inspired WFSAIA parts 1-3? Well, a number of reasons. We had to wait for our long overdue Coast Guard documentation to come in before we could leave the country (like registering your car, but on a federal level), which it did after the first week, giving us a piece of paper that could officially prove we own our boat. The rest of the time we spent waiting for a decent weather window and taking advantage of the down time to tackle both large and small projects we had been saving for a warm port, convenient to West Marine and the hardware store. Once we moved up to North Palm Beach it seemed we had the best such port we could expect to find, so our days were easily filled with boat work, related errands all over town, and provisioning for our departure.     Apparently, one should label one's cans with permanent marker so tha...