Staniel cay

There are a couple of things you must do in Staniel Cay. They won't let you leave otherwise. Dive into Thunderball cave, and feed the pigs. So we cracked on with it.

But first, if there's anyfink you need doing here, anyfink at all, just arsk Big Ray:

Not little Jimmy, he's no use.

Big Ray, he's da geezer.

Cave daughter.

Here comes a pig, to see what we've brought to feed him.

He takes a sniff at yesterday's rice and lentils.

But even a pig can be persuaded to eat the stuff.

Just throw it into their unsuspecting mouths.

There's got to be a caption for this one.. any suggestions?

I think we can go now.

North from Georgetown

I was going to write about my 2 mile walk to try the fishing at Crab Cay by Georgetown, only to find the way barricaded with barbed wire and gates, and a big warning sign about what happens to trespassers. I hate the presumption that land ownership precludes right of way. I habitually trespass, always have. But I remembered I hadn't found a post office yet, and so I hadn't yet paid for my cruising permit, so officially... it might be best not to take risks with officialdom, for the time being at least.

Tie in the zillions of plastic bags in use here and caught in trees and bushes and in the harbours, and the use of vehicles so gigantic that you'd be inclined to think maximum fuel consumption was somehow mandatory - these islands are very small, and very flat - and I could get a good rant in about capitalism and consumerism gone mad.

Oh, and the food waste at Exuma Market, Georgetown. We've got by in the last weeks with few vegetables, because they are so very expensive - and on top of that, often such poor quality that by the time you get them back to the boat, they have perceptively deteriorated. So when I noticed a shop worker throwing what looked like perfectly good vegetables into boxes to be discarded, I had to have a chat. He acknowledged the waste, and abhorred it himself. He'd have been as happy to eat it as I would. It gets dumped - occasionally he has managed to give a box to a passing boater, but he risks his job doing that. He wanted it to be given to the poor - and with food prices so high in the Bahamas, there are plenty who don't get enough good food. I checked the area where the 'waste' food gets loaded onto a truck, but was shown a security camera by one of the workers.

Yeah, I was going to go off on one about all that, but then we went sailing. You wouldn't want the rant anyway. We have to get to Nassau by the 9th, for the crew to catch a flight. The wind was F4-5, and it was a close reach all the way up chain of islands, on the Atlantic side. We were looking for a cut to get through to the sheltered side, where all the shallow flat water is.

After an hour or two, we were doodling along at 5 knots with reduced sail. The water was a bit lumpy, and we weren't planning on going far to go today, so it seemed best to let the boat idle through the waves. Then I saw a sail behind us, far off, but I could make out the square top of the mainsail, and I saw how fast the boat was gaining on us, and I reckoned that it could only be one boat out of the hundred or so in the anchorage. A Dick Newick design - a fantastically shaped boat, and though the design is old, still fantastically fast. To reduce embarrassment at being over-hauled at the threatened rate, I raised all sail, and we started clobbering our way through the waves at 7 knots. That's as fast as we could go.

'Scrumpy, Scrumpy, this is Triad.'

Yep, that's the boat. I'd seen the name when we sailed into Georgetown. I'd waved to the man with all the curves, and he waved back, looking at Scrumpy's own curves. We 'knew' each other already. So he's calling me now.

'Hello Triad.'

'Hey Scrumpy. Nice boat you've got there. What's the design?'

I'll translate. Hey Scrumpy, we're about to go screaming past you, which you'll probably find embarrassing, so I'm being polite with a heads-up.

'Hi Triad. Thanks - it's a Richard Woods Sagitta. I reckon yours is a Newick, and that we'll get a closer look soon?'

(Glad I sneaked more sail up before he gets close enough to see!)

'Well, maybe, but we're just moseying along, with just the mainsail up.'

I'm sorry, but this is going to really embarrass you, as we cruise past you half-rigged.

'Oh that's a shame Triad, I was hoping to get some nice pictures as you went by.'

Oh come on! At least look like you're making some effort!.

'You're going to get your camera out? In that case, we'd better get the foresail up too.'

Ah, he's going to let us off with some dignity, overtaking us with full working sail. Phew! Here he comes, with two sails up

Hello!

Goodbye!

Hey, Triad, there's always someone faster...

Right after that, the rod bent, and I turned the boat into the wind to slow us down. A dorado, at last!

What colours!

It was a big one, so I called Triad and invited them to dinner. They were headed to Leaf Cay, which sounded nice as desert islands go, so we said we'd meet them there.

Different colours.

A visitor! What could it be?

Looks like a shark alright, attracted by the fish guts.

Not shy then.

I figured hanging the stripped carcass of the dorado from the tiller bar might be fun. I threaded a rope through the fish, tied one end to the bar, and held the other end in my hand. I wanted to be able to release the rope, rather than have the shark bend my tiller bar.

It's a Bull shark, one of the more dangerous kinds..

Tom and Judy from Triad joined us for dinner. They brought a salad, with lots of stuff in it. Not just our usual cabbage and onion, but all kinds of vegetables, and cranberries and cashews and, well, you'd have to live on rice and beans for a good while to appreciate it. A long list of ingredients isn't going to do anything for you. Oh, and they brought rum too, and we all ate as much as we could of the fish, and we all had it for lunch the next day too. They've owned that boat for 23 years, and sail between New England and the Caribbean like it was nothing, but they typically hit 18 knots close reaching, and the boat is so slim and curved, the ride has got to be good, so maybe it is nothing. I pointedly didn't ask what sort of speed they get downwind. Fast enough is all. I got a tour of the boat next day, carbon fibre rotating mast, carbon in the daggerboard, foils in the outriggers to increase lift (good for another 2-3 knots, Tom says), and light, light, light. The tools would fit in my pocket. Even spares are minimal. The kitchen, the whole kitchen, would almost fit in my sink, and I don't have a big sink.

Next morning, at the beach, we are not alone!

So far, this is the most crowded beach we've been on in the Bahamas.

Tom's brought them some chopped apple.

Later, Tom offered me a fish spearing lesson. Excellent!

Look, no sharks.

It's all in the sneaking up on the fish, apparently. We scored zero, but had more close encounters than previously anyway. Thanks Tom!

There may be more of Tom and Judy later. Judy flies out of Nassau on the 9th too.

Salt Pond, Long Island to Georgetown, Exuma

We sailed on up the west coast of Long Island, and dropped anchor where we found a wifi signal. A shallow draft boat and an wifi antenna is handy :) Bahamian people don't seem to bother with passwords any more than they do with locks.

Has someone stolen the lock?

Long Island is 80 miles long, and no more than 4 miles across. There's a road from one end to the other - well, actually, it goes both directions. We anchored at Salt Pond, which the guide book described as having all we were needing - gas, fresh food, and all I'd be needing to stock the boat ready for crossing the Atlantic again. We needed water too. The stuff we got from the spring on Crooked Island was pretty dirty. I'd siphoned it through a makeshift filter (cotton wool, funnel) and added some bleach but it didn't taste nice and our guts weren't happy about it. However, there wasn't much of anything in Salt Pond - nice new buildings, a bar and a club house with verandahs and all, but boarded up, and a supermarket that was closed down. There was just a garage really, where we paid $20 for enough water to fill the tanks. I was told there was a bank 8 miles or so down the road, and set off walking. I was confident someone would stop to give me a ride, so I didn't try to hitch for a lift. I wanted to walk for a while. Little things catch my eye.

Why say it in a few words when there's room for so many more?

Elfin safety gone.

400 yards from the sea.

I made it for a couple of miles before a pickup screeched to a halt and took me to the bank. I was a minute at the ATM, walked back to the road, and immediately got a ride back to the boat. I was lucky to have managed the couple of miles walking.

Sorry, you weren't expecting quirky silly pictures? Not what you expect of a Caribbean trip. OK, here you go then...

Another sunset, Salt Pond

With the wifi, I emailed a weather server, and received a forecast I can display on my chart in the navigation program (OpenCpn). That showed a norther heading our way, and we were currently only sheltered from the east, so we decided to sail on the Georgetown, Exuma. Good shelter there, from every direction, if we can use the shallow draft of the boat to get in nice and close, somewhere too shallow for other boats to use. The charts on my laptop weren't as detailed as the charts on my phone, so I found a spot with the phone, and then used the app on the phone to plan a route though the coral reefs and sand banks and cays and rocks, and then transferred the waypoints to my laptop, and we set off on a nice reach. A steady 7 knots across flat water.

I'm still not used to the colour of the water here.

Did you hear what I did there? I logged onto the internet on the boat to check the weather and... To me, it's fabulous stuff. Look, here's a display from my laptop:

That's us, the red boat bottom right. The dashed line at the front of the boat is a vector showing where we'd be in half an hour's time on the current heading. The blue line with diamond shapes on is the route I have plotted. I saw a boat following the same route, and set the program to record his track, to see what I could learn from where he went. That's the purple/pink slightly wobbly line. He went very close to where I am aiming for, Kidd's Cove, so it's handy to follow him. What else - those green triangle things - they are other boats who are transmitting an AIS signal. I do the same, so the other boats can see me on their screens. From their triangles and any vectors in front of them, I can see at a glance who's going where. An alarm goes off if a crash is immanent. I can click on any of the boats and get lots of information about them, including their names, so that I can call them on the radio if I want.

All this technical stuff is available relatively cheaply. Any old laptop will do. I chose one that is doesn't use much power, to conserve electricity. It's worked fine for 3 years. The wifi antenna was £25 or so. The AIS box was a lot - nearly £450, but I bought a box that transmits as well as receives. Because I sail single-handed, it's best to be able to announce my position to other boats.

Here's where we arrived, from a screenshot on my phone (any phone with gps would do, and the navigation app, with all the charts of the Caribbean included, was £10):

Screenshot from my phone

The red triangle is where we are anchored, close enough to walk ashore if you don't mind wet shorts, and sheltered from all directions.

I don't take this stuff for granted. I've been sailing a long time now. Navigation equipment was limited to a sextant and a radio direction finder, and paper charts. You need the sun, stars or the moon and a clear view of the horizon to use the sextant. Then a pile of books with tables in them, and a few minutes to do calculations. You might get a position from that (a fix) if you can shoot several stars, or just a position line if you shoot the sun or the moon. The radio direction finder depended on signals from lighthouses which were stronger or weaker according to the weather and the time of day, and the signals could be bent by fog(!). You'd ascertain the direction of a lighthouse from the radio signal, then remember to adjust the bearing by the deviation (the amount the compass is deviated by the boat) and adjust it for variation (to allow for the difference between magnetic north and true north) remembering that the variation itself varied according to where you were. And the weather forecasts? Well, in my early days, from what I'd read, I'd understood that a seaworthy boat should be able to cope, so I figured I should be able to cope, and so didn't bother with the weather too much. I was stupid, misinformed, naive, ridiculously optimistic and lucky. Make your own cocktail out of that.

A Triune trimaran, 30' long, 18' wide.

Here's a picture. I'm not sure if it was my first boat (there were only 6 of these built), but if it's not, it was very similar. Look, they hadn't even invented colour in those days!

And here, though it hardly belongs with this blog is an excerpt from something I wrote from those olden times, describing a storm I encountered that taught me the limitations of that boat. Just a sextant and a broken radio direction finder and a foolish attitude to the weather.

Uncharted waters

We drifted the 30 miles across the channel between Crooked Island and Long Island under spinnaker, turned right and dropped anchor for the night. On turning north, we're homeward bound at last. We've travelled west for hundreds and thousands of miles in the tropics, and now, we're following the wind and current as it turns northward, and soon we'll be out of the tropics. We're already at the limits of the trade wind belt. It'll stay warm for a while. It'll be the sub-tropics after all, but still, the northward journey has begun with the turn around the appropriately named South Point of Long Island.

The turn north marks a new phase. It's on the outward journey that noses are pressed to windows, and scenery absorbed and wonders romanticised. But the homeward journey is inevitably a time of reflection on what the journey has brought, and where we stand now, and of what that home is we are returning to - how it looks after all the water under the bridgedeck and from this furthest distance. Even though the scenery here is as fabulous as any, with turquoise clear water and coral, flat seas and gentle warm winds, the essence of a journey is the romance, and the romance of going home has a different flavour to the romance of leaving for foreign tropical parts. This part of the journey seems to be a job that needs doing, though it would be very remiss of me to wish myself ahead of myself, and to reduce these cays and bays and coral islands to stepping stones to somewhere more familiar.

As we are on the limits of the trade wind belt, I guess I can't complain that as soon as we'd gone to bed the wind turned to the south. The shelter from the easterly swell we'd taken round Southern Point was no shelter from the south, and we had a noisy and bouncy night. The anchor would hold, and it made no sense to sail amongst the coral in the dark looking for more sheltered water so we had to put up with it.

We were still keen to buy some fresh food, and Dick had told us about the farmer's market at Clarence Town, 15 miles north. Clarence Town is on the opposite side of the island, but most of it is only 2 miles wide, so it wouldn't be too far to walk. We sailed up and anchored as close as we dared to the shore. But the wind had increased, and it was clear that we wouldn't be able to land the dinghy on the beach without risking damage. Jack pulled the long straw and paddled ashore in the kayak. It turns out it that the source of food isn't a farmer's market, but a government warehouse, that gets filled with produce and shipped on to the smaller islands round about. The ship leaves on a Wednesday. The farmers bring their produce on a Tuesday. This being Monday, all there was in the warehouse was one box of peppers and one box of onions. And the supermarket described in the cruising guide had closed down. Jack did a little better, with the generous assistance of a local, who drove him the 8 miles to the nearest shop, and then drove him back to the beach (the Bahamas is like that!).

It was too late to move on - we always need to arrive places in good light, so that we can pick our way amongst the reefs - so we stayed where we were for the night, determined anyway to sail to Sandy Cay and cut north through there towards Georgetown (where all manner of food is available, so we're told). Dick had pointed out Sandy Cay as an island full of peculiar trees and many iguanas. That's what made it a reasonable destination.

Half way, we came across shoals of fish feeding,

making the water boil around the boat. We dropped sails and motored about amongst the fish. It was clear that the fish were eating tiny fish, no more than an inch long. I didn't have a lure that I thought could work, but there were so many fish, I hoped to drop a lure directly onto one and snag it.

After half an hour of that, it became obvious the fish - though massed in a feeding frenzy with hardly any water between them - were still too agile to allow my hook anywhere near them. We sailed away, and straight away, we caught a fish.

Another bloody barracuda,

 which we released.

We'd started later than I'd hoped, and the fishing diversion delayed us further, so it was already past high tide when we arrived at the cut by Sandy Cay.

The current was beginning to flow out of the channel, and I didn't fancy spending much time anchoring there. We threw the anchor down anyway, and quickly rowed over to Sandy Cay. There were no signs of any iguanas and the trees looked pretty normal too. I guess there is more than one Sandy Cay in the Bahamas. This wasn't the one we were looking for.

The waters north of Sandy Cay are uncharted, a blue blank, in the navigation package I have on my laptop, and there's little more detail on my Navionics chart on my phone. 'Shallow sandy area' about covers it. I'd figured that even if it was marked as wet sand, at high tide (3 feet) we'd be able to sail across it.

The best detail I had of the area was from google Earth. Though the tide was falling, and the current in the channel against us and increasing in speed, I decided we'd go ahead anyway.

We made it to the end of the channel with a little assistance from the outboard to help in the dying wind and increasing current. I was half way up the mast to spy a route beyond the end of the channel when the rudders caught the bottom and we came to a halt.

The rudders were designed to swing up when they hit the bottom, but the builder of this boat did a half-hearted job of following that design, and they'd only swing up a couple of inches before the tiller hit the deck and prevented the required amount of swinging. I'd sliced the rudder shafts and had articulating joints built into the system, and made some cassettes to fill the slots. But I was in too much of a hurry to leave the boat yard back in the UK and this is the job that still didn't get done properly. The rudders can lift, but only by removing a couple of bolts first, then lifting the rudders a little, then pulling them hard. The one thing I'd wanted to be sure of in my hurry was that the rudders would never swing up as we were surfing down a wave. I thought that if I didn't have time to perfect the system, I'd err on the side of keeping the rudders down, rather than have them swing up easily. That was all very good surfing across the Atlantic. Now we were sitting on the rudders and the tide was falling.

We dropped sail and got out the toolbox and undid the bolts holding the rudders. We jumped overboard and with a little heaving and grunting and the odd curse from the port side (the side that was most awkward, and the one I was dealing with). At last, we got the rudders raised, and with no damage.

The boat was now free of the bottom, and I waded out to set the anchor, and we sat on deck to consider the options. We could dry out here on the sand quite safely, but the next high tide would be between 2-3 in the morning, and the following on, the next afternoon. That's a long time to mostly sit on wet sand. And the tide being a spring tide, the following high tides wouldn't be as high as this one. Jack suggested that since the water was so shallow, we could simply drag that boat. I laughed. To where? How far? And then I waded out to retrieve the anchor.

Towing the boat was easier than it sounds - the wind, such as it was, was behind us. If we could get the rudders far enough down to provide some steerage, but able to swing up it we hit the ground again, maybe we could sail after all? A little more work:

Now we had it easy again, sailing downwind, but it was hot in the afternoon sun sailing with downwind with the little breeze.

It's not safe, usually, to be towed behind a yacht. But in these circumstances it seemed an excellent idea. If Sif happened to let go of the rope, there was no danger of sailing off without her. All we would have to do is drop the sail - and she could walk back to the boat!

As we approached the anchorage I remembered Hans, who I'd met in the Algarve. I was sitting on the deck when he sailed into the lagoon on one of the most extraordinary boats I've ever seen. He was sailing a 70 foot polynesian asymmetric catamaran he'd built in the Gambia in 3 months. He sailed onto the sand bank ahead of me, and jumped off the bow with an anchor. He walked up the bank, stuck the anchor in the ground, climbed back aboard and continued his cup of coffee.

I got to know Hans over the next few weeks, and he would sail that huge boat about perfectly easily single-handed as if it was a dinghy, and would sometimes tack around where I was anchored (often in a crowded anchorage) to inform me of where we might meet again or to swap opnions on the weather, sailing about like that with a cup of coffee in his hand as if he was born to it. (He was in fact born into it.)

Anyway, we sailed into the anchorage north of Lower Channel Cay. It must have been a surprise to the other yacht, for us to appear from the south side of that island.

Nobody sails about here with so little wind, and we'd just sailed across a large expanse of uncharted wet sand. As we approached the anchorage, Sif steered the boat into the wind, I dropped the sail, Jack lowered the anchor, I picked up my cup of tea, and remembered Hans.