Rudder Cay

Blossom at anchor at Rudder Cay. 

I swear, these colors are real and not photo shopped!

View from our deck

We’ve just spent 4 days anchored off Rudder Cay, about 9 miles north of our last anchorage. It’s extremely pretty here and we spent a few days just exploring in the dinghy with our snorkel gear.  The big attraction here is the piano and mermaid that David Copperfield placed in the water off of Rudder Cay. So we were sure to get the obligatory photos!  The current rips through here so everyone flocks to snorkel it at high/low slack. I didn’t get the picture of the 4+ foot barracuda that floated nearby watching all the action. I’ll bet he comes by at slack regularly to check out all the action.

Mermaid at the piano

Martin playing the piano with the mermaid listening in

Me free falling – can’t get any lower because of my ears!

Cays to the south (the Darby’s)

Eagle rays

Sting rays

Snorkeling

Cruising around

Small cays to the north

Mushi Cay, gorgeous resort - David Copperfield owns it. You can rent it for mucho $$ if you'd like :)

We had an especially beautiful sunset one evening and I snapped a few pictures. 

Ithaki at sunset

We visited the boat in the photo to see if they’d like any of the photos and that’s how we met Elizabeth & Morgan. They’re a fun, friendly young couple who just moved aboard their boat, Ithaki. We invited them over for cocktails one evening and had a fantastic time.  I hope that we’ll cross paths with them again!  It was auspicious that they happened to be aboard that evening when we found that our bilge pump had gone off 36 times in the last 24 hours. Morgan, an experienced merchant marine, was able to help Martin sleuth the problem. Someone, ahem, like me, hadn’t turned the faucet off on the swim step hose. The make shift nozzle (we broke it a while back), began to leak and the fresh water dripped into the bilge. I took one for the team – I did taste the water in the bilge to determine that it was fresh (and slightly oily, water :/  yuck.)

A couple of boats that we’d met while exploring the cave at Norman’s Pond came into the anchorage while we were there. We stopped by to say hi to everyone. It’s fun to see the same folks as you skip up the cays.  One afternoon we were looking for a shark in the bay by our boat and our dinghy stalled out (no, we not run out of gas J It was quickly remedied when we got back to Blossom).  The folks from a nearby boat, Gabriel 1, were kind enough to tow us back to Blossom. We were quite grateful as we weren’t making much progress rowing against the incoming current!  We asked them over for cocktails as a thank you and we had a lovely evening with Lyle, Gary & Carol. They’ve travelled here from South Africa via the Caribbean and had the most amazing stories to tell! We saw them a couple days later when we went up to visit Little Farmers Cay. We enjoyed a beer, great company, and got a tour of their very spacious cat. We’re hoping we’ll meet up with them again as we head north.

Gabriel 1 

Sean & Louise left Rudder Cay a few days ahead of us and anchored in a pretty little bay up at Big Farmers Cay.  So one afternoon we took the dinghy up to Little Farmer Cay, about 6 miles away.

Vector at anchor

We met them and had lunch at the Farmers Cay Yacht Club. The owner, Roosevelt, was eager for me to post a pic to their new Facebook page. I got a good photo but as a friend noted, I forgot to include the kalik beer (barely visible center top of photo :)!

Bahamian Lunch

View from lunch at Farmers Cay Yacht Club

Little Farmers is very small settlement. Martin and I walked around for a bit, spoke with a local artist about his wood carvings and headed home.

On Thursday, we had our first spring? summer? storm.  Blossom got a good wash and we anxiously waited for the thunder & lightening to pass. It was nice to have a “rain day”. Martin attended to some maintenance issues and I worked on the blog. We also decided to head up to Black Point on Friday where we’ll meet up with Sean & Louise who went ahead on Wednesday. We had been planning on getting there on Friday but I’d like to start going north.  There are a few bays along the west side of Great Guana Cay that look like they’d be fun to explore and hopefully calm/current-free enough to SUP in. 

There may also be a blowy front coming next week from the west. Since there aren’t many places to take cover from west/southwest winds, everyone will be cramming into the nooks and crannies. So I’d like to see Great Guana now and be positioned a bit north and on the bank in case we need to duck in for a day or two.  We’re also in need of some fresh food and there’s a grocery store in Black Point.

The weather is definitely changing. In addition to our first thunder storm, the winds are calming down and it’s getting warmer. It was so calm the other night that I looked down and saw this:

We were just sitting on top of our anchor in what looks like really shallow water. It’s actually about 11 feet deep.

I know I post a lot of sunset pictures, but I can’t help myself. So here are a few more J

Petal and her new friend enjoying a pink sunset

Boat Business: 

• Martin finished some routine maintenance things like cleaning strainers and filters. 
• He also cleaned the bilge since I was kind enough to fill it with clean water for him.  

Next post though...getting parts shipped to the Exumas :/  How's that for a cliff hanger?!

Windy winding ways at Lee Stocking

Our last evening in the anchorage, enjoying cocktails from the flybridge

Emerald Bay Marina, in need of landscaping!

Blossom and Vector nose to nose

A week ago, last Saturday, we headed out of Elizabeth Harbour to Emerald Bay Marina just 13 miles north.  We needed to go there so we could pick up some diesel and gas and decided to spend the night there so we could better time our arrival into Adderly Cut the following day. We spent one night at the “no services” dock (no water, electric, pump out, etc) and docked right in front of Vector. We all went to dinner at a local bar/grill and got ready to head north the next day. The marina has very nice floating docks and facilities but it looks undone - they ran out of money before the landscaping was finished. I understand that the marina is currently for sale. 

We left the marina the next day and arrived at Adderly Cut in the afternoon. Vector was able to squeeze through and anchor right in front of the now defunct marine research center on Lee Stocking Cay. They only saw a bit over 7 feet as they went in and it was high tide so we decided to hang back and anchor a bit farther north.  We anchored in a spot that Michel  & Caroline from Sea Turtle pointed out to us where they used to anchor their 7’2” draft sail boat.  We’re backed up close to a sand bank but have plenty of swing room. 

Blossom art, drawing faces

Anchor track, doing the figure 8s

We’re having a very strange phenomenon happen here though.  Normally in high winds or with a strong current, the boat will pull out to the end of the anchor chain and you swing back and forth at the end of the chain. If winds are light, we tend to meander and sail quite a bit, resulting in a messy path as Blossom does a walk-about through the anchor circle.  In this spot, on the rising tide, Blossom is caught in an OCD-like pattern of pacing around in circles making a figure 8 over our anchor. Petal flips back and forth, lying sideways to Blossom on the port or aft side as the lee side changes. It’s the strangest thing we’ve seen yet at anchor.  Obviously there’s a strange fight going on between current and the wind and/or we’re lying in a strange eddy. You can see that we let out more chain after we went out in Petal to make sure we wouldn’t wash up on the sand bar with more scope.

To the west, you can see how the sand bar cuts the outgoing current so the sailboat is comfy.

Anchorage to the east where Vector was anchored.

  

Blossom at anchor

It was quite windy here until the last couple of days. Now it’s finally calming down a bit.

We’ve been here now for 5 full days and we’ve had a great time exploring.  I managed to capture most of our explorations with photos…

They have a pretty pinkish hue

These two were circling each other, having a standoff it appeared

Big, big guy

Martin on the beach after the iguanas got tired of waiting for food

We visited Leaf Cay and were mobbed by pink iguanas as soon as the dinghy landed. We didn’t bring food so I felt a bit bad but we saw a tourist boat come after we left so they got their snack!  These iguana were bigger than the ones up north and a bit more bold.

Even the birds were bold!

We spent a couple of days snorkeling around the area. We found a nice spot on the west side of Norman’s Pond. We saw a tour boat snorkeling there and returned some pool noodles that were making a break for freedom. When they left we checked it out.

It was a shallow reef area with lots of juvie fish

It’s a bad picture but that’s a file fish

Shark! (He’s small, about 3-4 feet, but still!)

One day we went out looking for a snorkeling spot off the cays near the cut. Then we found a small shark swimming in the shallows who was also looking for fish and that kind of killed the mood for me.

There’s a salt pond in the middle of Norman’s Pond Cay that we checked out one day. The entrance is too shallow, even for our dinghy, so we returned at high tide with a kayak (Martin) and a SUP (me). You enter through a shallow canal lined with mangroves and it opens into a very large, shallow pond. It was tranquil and beautiful. The canal was a nursery for fish. We had hoped to find conch shells there that had died of natural causes so they’d have no holes. (We want to make a conch horn). But it seems all the conch were harvested long ago – we only saw a few small live conch and a few decent old shells that had been harvested. We did manage to find a couple that might work. They’re soaking in bleach now.

The entrance to the pond

A huge ray came by to watch Martin anchor the dinghy

The mangrove-lined canal

Baby barracuda (about 6 inches).

He was just as curious the adult barracudas seem to be. He followed us a bit through the canal.

The salt pond

A couple people have asked me why I don’t have pictures of me in the blog more often. Here you go!

Exiting the canal

We did some exploring by dinghy to check out the neighborhood. 

There are a few beautiful beaches along the east side of Lee Stocking Island.

We also went out to see the “tug and barge” cays that sit off to the southwest of the anchorage. There wasn’t much there but we did see a gorgeous osprey eating a fish. I wish I’d been quick enough to catch a picture of him as he flew away with this lunch. I don’t think he was happy we were there, he was quite vocal about our approach.

  

We managed to find the “submarine cave” on Norman’s Pond Cay after looking for it a couple of days. You need to be at low tide, and it helps if you see a family of cruisers who’ve just found it! I jumped in the entrance but had no desire to check out the 250 feet below!

Cave

Living creature or fossil?

Blossom in a ray of sunlight during a rain shower

We’re leaving this afternoon to go to Rudder Cay, about 10 miles north of here. Sean & Louise went up yesterday so we’ll be meeting them there.  We’re looking forward to exploring the area and checking out the mermaid and piano snorkeling site.