We haven't posted in so long, there have been a few inquiries about our whereabouts. The horizon may look like we've fallen off the face of the earth, but we haven't. We are currently in Black Point in the Exumas, enjoying a leisurely meander down the Exuma chain of islands.
We left our Nassau anchorage late in the morning a few weeks ago. Our departure was delayed when our anchor wouldn't come up. Nassau harbor is famous for having a littered scoured bottom. Lee had his suspicions the day before when a nearby plastic jug attached as a mooring marker to an unknown underwater weight (ideally known as a mooring ball) disappeared. He worried that our anchor chain had nabbed it and continued to tangle around it as the boat swung. There was no way to tell from the surface. As he tried to raise the anchor, a weight much greater than our anchor kept turning off the circuit breaker to the electric anchor winch. I'm pretty proud of myself for writing this technical stuff. Lee will probably come along and correct it all, but, until we got this boat, I was the anchor wench and think I know a lot about anchoring. So Lee spent two hours analyzing, attaching lines, using both the chain and lines to slowly raise the 500 pound ship's anchor that our chain was well attached to. Later we heard another boat call the harbor patrol to come over and detach a similar anchor that they had caught. We dragged the anchor over to a shallower spot out of the way of future cruisers and attached a new jug to mark it. Some say we should have sold it.
After that delay we didn't arrive at Norman's Cay until sunset and had to anchor outside the anchorage until morning. Then it took over an hour to motor around the sandbar and into the more protected anchorage with the other boats. We have outlasted some 50 knot blows, only one reason why Norman's is one of our favorite stops.
The little islets, the shelling, the biking, the restaurant, we never skip this stop. It has a very bad, but bikeable road extending past the runway on the south all the way to the north, around the pond and down to the cut into Norman's Pond. It is probably only ten miles round trip, but feels like fifty with all the vertical bouncing. We hardly see a soul except for crew building a large house with guest house and crew house, but always find people on the beach after we've spent two hours biking and hiking to get there. They have sailed into the narrow pond entrance from the sound, which I plan never to do-you can only get in and out in good conditions at high tide.
Beaches for shelling, comfortable lawn chairs and strange creatures are at the end of the ride.
We weren't sure what we were looking at until we tipped it over with a stick and found it to be a jelly fish of some sort.By the time we got back to the south anchorage, we had earned a burger at MacDuff's. (We actually had a LOBSTER wrap! (Lee))The restaurant is next to the runway and always populated with people who have flown over from Nassau. There are only a few guest cottages and scattered homes, so they must come for the meal. We explored the anchorage at midtide, making sure we could get back to the boat, since large areas dry at low tide, picking up a few conch for dinner. They are the only bounty we've gotten so far on this trip-no fish. A kayaker herded a group of rays over near our boat and called us out to see them. Next destination: the land and sea park at Warderick Wells
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