Author: FloatsOurBoat

A vacation from our vacation

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A week out of Miami, and a month after leaving St Pete, we took a vacation from our vacation on gorgeous Green Turtle Cay in the Abacos.

As I write this, I feel you judging me, and I cringe. But look at it this way. In the two months since we moved on to Sanitas full time, we’ve had a lot of adjustments to make:

  • Selling or donating most of our possessions.
  • Moving from a house to an apartment to less than 120 feet of living space.
  • Embracing a new lifestyle where everything from cooking, shopping, keeping clean, and even going to the bathroom is more complex and time consuming.
  • Finding everything we own is wet and/or salty at all times.
  • Finding that my BED is wet AND salty all of the time.
  • Unplugging from phone and internet.
  • Starting to live on canned goods and whatever we planned ahead to bring with us.
  • Needing to think every day about where we are now, where we are going next, what the wind is doing, how deep the water is, and what the waves will be like.

I have to admit that it has been a difficult adjustment, and we were ready to remind ourselves of why we worked so hard to get here, and why this transient lifestyle is worth it.

So! For $1.50 per foot per night, we tucked Sanitas into a nice cozy slip, and gave her crew access to all of the amenities of the gorgeous Bluff House Resort and Marina: showers, pool, and the Tranquil Turtle Beach Bar. We might have taken a little TOO much advantage of that last one, lol.

Green Turtle Cay is lovely. I took a morning to jog on the Coco Bay beach to the North Point of the Island.

The huge wooden cross at North Point was constructed from an old sailboat mast, and commemorates the miraculous rescue of Grima and Francine Johnson whose boat washed ashore on the coral here on Thanksgiving Day 1981.

We rented bikes and explored the entire length of the island, with a stroll through the historic town of New Plymouth, founded in the 1770s by the Loyalists. This colorful town has everything you need, in miniature. Including a small grocery, four churches, a hardware store and the “Liquor and Lunch” shop.

Sounds perfect, but imagine riding these cute little beach cruisers up and down the short but steep hills all around the island. I admit, I had to walk up two hills on the way home after I filled my belly with lunch! Our sailing buddies rented a golf cart and took it all over the island, up and down hills, and on dirt roads, like speed demons!

We watched the budget by only ordering drinks from the bar during 2-for-1 happy hour. At the beach bar, happy hour is from 4 to 5. Then we ran over the hill to the other side of the island for happy hour from 5 to 6. The Goomba Smash is the specialty of Green Turtle Cay, and the Tranquil Turtle punches are pretty good too! We met fellow Coloradans at the Bluff House: including the guy who owns Boulder Beer and all of the restaurants in the Hotel Boulderado, and a great couple from Dillon, CO. Sanitas hosted a small party in the cockpit on our final evening before heading back out to the high seas.

Great Sale and Fox Town

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Our trip through the northern Bahamas has been dictated by the winds. It’s tricky for a sail boat of our size and design to sail straight into the wind, and in this part of the world, the prevailing winds are easterlies. So … we motored across the Little Bahama Banks to Mangrove Cay, and then to Great Sale Cay, where the Northwest Harbor is very well protected from the easterly winds. Unfortunately, there’s not much else going on at Great Sale. It is a small, uninhabited island of mostly mangroves, without the gorgeous sandy beaches of tropical fantasies. On our first night there, we had a had a potluck on the beach and watched the sunset (and were feasted upon by sand fleas in the meantime). The dinghy ride back into the wind was enough of a wet and salty ordeal that we didn’t try THAT again!

After that, we just sort of hung out in the harbor, watched the weather, and waited for lighter winds.

Eventually, we got a bit of cabin fever. On our first attempt to leave Great Sale, Sanitas and Orion sailed and motored into the wind for three hours … and then calculated that at a pace that was slowing to less than 3 knots,we would never make it to the the next safe harbor before sunset, so we turned around and motored back with our tails between our legs. Disorder won the bet that we’d be back before lunchtime!

Two more days in the same harbor and we were getting even more stir crazy, so we took the next opportunity to sail and motor east to Foxtown on Little Abaco Island. You’ve already heard about that great adventure, running aground in the Fox Town Harbor! You’d have thought we arrived in New York City by our excitement to reach civilization! The town was about 3 blocks long, with one restaurant, two mini marts, and one very active (aka, loud) church. We walked the entire length, met all of the local hustlers, sampled the local rum and the cracked conch (made especially for Mike and me with rice flour because we are allergic to wheat), and headed back to our boats with grocery bags filled with lobster tails.

After sampling all the delights of Fox Town, we still needed a few basic things, such as water, fuel, and internet. So our next stop would be beautiful Green Turtle Cay…..

Clearing Customs

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The Bahamas has figured out how to make clearing customs easy. Just hand over a lot of money. In cash.

When we arrived at the Old Bahama Bay Marina at West End on Grand Bahama Island after an overnight sail from Miami, the captain and crew were tired, and tempers frayed. We timed our arrival for just after sunrise, so that we would have good visibility entering a new harbor, and just before the Customs office opened, so we could breeze through without much wait. But we didn’t think about the fact that it would be Saturday … of Presidents’ Day weekend ….

As our three sailboats slowly made our slow and dignified approach into the harbor, planning to tie up at the Customs Dock, a sudden hoard of small and agile go-fast fishing boats zoomed around us and claimed all the spots at the dock. They promptly started blaring dance music, stripping down to bikinis, and popping the top of beer cans. Oh. And jumped ahead of us in the Customs line. It was a bit of a shock to realize that the trip from Miami that had taken us about 15 hours, was also achievable on a small boat with 2 or 4 powerful motors in just a couple of hours. And that the huge Gulf Stream crossing that we had been thinking about for months could be performed as part of a one-day fishing / drinking party. Oh well. It puts things in perspective, and reminds us that sail people and motor people are different breeds! Capt Mike got his revenge in the Customs line when the kids from the fishing boats were talking about the cost of diesel, and when they asked how long Mike was staying in The Bahamas and he answered, “oh, at least three months.” 😎

We carry a waterproof document bag that contains all important paperwork: passports, ship’s registration with the US Coast Guard, insurance, etc. Mike learned some good lessons about how the clear Customs smoothly from our previous charters:

  • Dress neatly
  • Bring your own pen (really!)
  • Have all documents in order (one of the fishing boats forgot their registration)
  • Be polite
  • Know the fees and have money ready in cash

In The Bahamas, a cruising permit authorizing Sanitas to sail in the water of the Commonwealth for three months costs $300. We intend to get our money’s worth! Each member of the ship’s crew also gets approved by immigration to stay in the country for a certain period of time. I think they gave us six months. Probably hoping for another $300 cruising permit! While Capt Mike was standing in line, I took advantage of being tied to the dock to make coffee, empty trash and even take a quick shower, cheating just a little bit on our Customs quarantine status. Finally we were all cleared in and officially and could lower the yellow Q flag, and raise the Bahamas courtesy flag, and continue sailing east across the Little Bahama Bank!

Worse Things Can Happen Than Running Aground

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Or so Captain Bill said in our sailing classes five years ago. I think he was trying to teach us the difference between “Mayday” and “Pan Pan” in radio etiquette. Our friends from St Pete had similar advice. “You’re going to run aground in The Bahamas. Don’t let it devastate you.” Still, there’s an element of “It will never happen to me” about running aground.

Well, now we’ve gotten that out of the way!

We left Great Sale harbor in marginal wind conditions, because we thought we might go crazy if we stayed one more day. Winds 13 to 17 on the nose, and seas that built gradually over the day. We got a nice early start, so even with beating into the wind, we arrived at the entrance to the Foxtown Harbor on Little Abaco Island before 2:00 pm. Theoretically, that allowed for great mid-day light to allow us to see the changing water colors indicating rocks or coral heads while standing on the bow looking at the world through polarized sunglasses. Unfortunately, what really happened, was I stood at the bow in a driving rain squall with rain washing sunblock into my eyes, wiping my sunglasses on the hem of my t shirt, and the sun completely hidden by clouds, so the water looked a uniform shade of grey across the whole harbor.

Mike had done his homework, comparing the paper charts in the Explorer Chartbooks and the electronic charts in our chart plotter and using Navionics, and plotted a detailed series of waypoints through the shallow areas and rocks to a preferred anchorage. But it is one thing to see a series of lines and dots on the chart plotter, and another to orient them to the real world landmarks and features around you in less than perfect conditions. Our friends on SV Orion radioed that they had just crossed an extremely shallow spot, that wasn’t captured on any of the charts, and they got us slightly spooked. SV Disorder took a different line into the harbor than Mike had plotted, and they were calling out depths in the 6 foot range. So we continued to follow our plan to head south and get closer to land, and then to turn east toward the closest anchorage. I was on the bow (remember that rain?) and Mike was at the helm and we had to shout to hear each other over the wind. Mike called, ” is that dark water shallow? Or it is a shadow? Which way do I turn?” But there was no good direction to turn. We were essentially aiming straight at a horizontal band of rocks that, according to the charts, we had already safely passed. Mike went from calling out safe depths of 11’4″ and 10’8″ to a dead stop in less than a minute. We jammed Sanitas into reverse, we were well and truly stuck for about 15 seconds, and then the prop walk started a turn that allowed us to spin all the way around and head back the way we came. With no clear idea of how to enter the harbor, but without needing to radio for a tow boat.

After finding a safe anchorage, Mike dove the hull and found only a few scratches – nothing too heavily damaged. There may have been a few frayed nerves and short fuses on Sanitas that night as her crew recovered from the scare!

Recovering with cracked conch and rum at Da Valley restaurant in Foxtown.