Nassau to Cat Cay

On June 15, we left Shroud Cay and had an easy trip over the Yellow Banks to Nassau, a shallow area of water that extends for miles with a particularly shallow stretch of only eight feet for several of those miles.  It is weird to be zipping along when you can see the bottom and coral heads so clearly mere feet beneath your keel.  This is a much better route than the one we took going south to Allen’s Cay as there are not as many coral heads to dodge. 

Hello Nassau

We took a slip in Nassau at the Nassau Harbour Club, which made it much easier to remove the main sail.  Earlier in the week, I’d emailed Phillips Sailmakers in Nassau to set up the main sail repair which looked like a go.  On Sunday morning, it only took an hour for Rod, Dave and I to remove and pack the sail.  On Monday morning, they picked it up, completed the repair as well as resewing all of the seams and brought it back Tuesday afternoon.  Thank all deities that the breeze was precisely on the nose at the dock which allowed us to get the sail back up without a hitch.  Actually there was one hitch – the stitcher had sewn seams through two of the batten pockets.  At 4:55pm, I made a call to the sail loft and they told me to just clip the offending stitches and that the seam would not unravel.  So clip away I did, and we finished raising the sail and putting up the bimini at 7:00pm.  Evelyne helped with this, too.  As mentioned, the sail is 611 square feet so is a bear to handle.  We were exhausted, but raring to get going the next morning, and very thankful to have our main sail repaired so quickly and ready fly fully in the wind again to take us to our next destination.   

 

Future cruisers in training in Nassau

So long, Nassau

On the morning of June 19, Rod, Evelyne, Dave and Linda hugged each other at the dock because it would be the last time that we could touch.  Then Manatee and Wayward Wind slipped out of our slips, motoring past humongous cruise ships at dock in Nassau Harbour.  Next stop, our last in the Bahamas, Cat Cay, some 40 miles from the Florida coastline.  We switched from motor-sailing to sailing downwind throughout the day in choppy seas.  Finally the wind picked up to 15 knots and we sailed beautifully through the night.  For about six hours during the night, we provided a ride to a hitch-hiker, a Night Heron, who perched upon our dinghy swaying to the ups and downs of the rolling boat.  Manatee mostly motor-sailed but was able to sail part of the night, too.  We both anchored at Cat Cay at 8:30 the next morn.  We’re getting pretty good at doing overnights.  We don’t have a set schedule, but we take two to three hour shifts through the night.  This way we each get two solid hours of sleep a couple of times during the night.  It seems to work out well.

Cat Cay does not offer a lot of protection from winds with a southerly component which is what we had.  The reef behind which we’d anchored calms the seas somewhat, but the winds still blow through.  Right after anchoring, we realized that we were just on the edge of the flight approach zone to the local airport whose landing strip stretched nearly to the edge of the nearby point of land.  We moved the boat farther to the east to a sandy patch and made sure to dig in the anchor.  Soon after, a medium-sized tanker cruised in to the harbor crossing the flight approach zone just as a small plane happened to come in for a landing.  From our vantage point, it looked as if the plane’s wheels barely missed the stacks on the freighter.  We were very glad that we’d moved away from the zone and channel with our 64.5 foot mast.  A while later, we saw Manatee reanchoring.  At first we thought maybe they wanted to be closer to us, but no, their anchor had drug.  Dragging anchors are a drag!  Once we were all resettled we tried to have a good night’s sleep to get ready to make our way to the East Coast the next morn.