Shroud Cay

Thursday morning we left Palm Cay Marina at high tide and headed south to Shroud Cay. It was a picture perfect day, a welcomed change from the rainy, blowy weather we’d been having.  We haven’t been running the boat from the fly bridge much so we were happy to have the opportunity to give it a go.

Enjoying running the boat from the fly bridge

Mom, enjoying the view

We arrived at Shroud around 3pm and anchored just next to the mooring field. We quickly went about setting up the boat. We put our sun shades on the pilot house windows, splashed Petal, washed down the cockpit and uncovered the furniture and hung the shades up there. Martin and I have gone through the routine that we can get everything set up pretty quickly. It was warm and sunny with a slight breeze – perfection!

View from the anchorage

Enjoying our lanai

It was hot so we broke out our snorkeling gear and took a swim around Blossom. The water was crystal clear and it looked like it was just a few feet deep, not 10!  Mom and I spent the late afternoon sewing on the fly bridge. Then we had a great barbeque dinner. We pretty much collapsed into bed that night.

Heading out to explore, Blossom is in the background

Our first full day a Shroud we went exploring. We packed/wore swim suits and head up north to Norman’s Cay. We had anchored out there in ’09 and visited McDuff’s – a very pretty restaurant known for its hamburger. There are 12 people who live on the island and there’s an airport there. The cay has an airstrip which is infamous for being used by drug runners in years past.  We anchored the dinghy off the beach and had a great lunch there. I wish I’d taken a picture of the seating area. It was like eating in an outdoor living room.

Anchored off of Norman’s

Grumpy Martin

Heading to McDuff’s

After lunch we went around to check out the sunken airplane.

 We decided not to snorkel it but I tried to capture it in a photo. (It’s right at a cut and I was having a particularly shark-anxious day.) Instead, we scoped out a few areas on the way back to Shroud, passing Wax Cay and stopped to snorkel around some big rocks.  We found a few really pretty snorkel sites with quite a variety of fish.

Mom snorkeling

Snorkel Break

Queen conch – isn’t she beautiful? (We were in the Exuma Park at the time, not that I would have killed her for her shell, but it is also a no-take zone)

Sargent Major hangout

One area had a lot of worms. I’ve never seen the yellow ones before. I'm not very familiar with the worms but I tried to identify them from my Reef Creature book.

Yellow Feather Duster Worm

Variegated Feather Duster

Shell and two feather duster worms

Thorny Sea Star

Swimming from snorkel site to snorkel site, could it be any more beautiful?

Cool snorkel picture of my Mom

We got home in the late afternoon and we were absolutely exhausted. It was a fabulous day on the water but sun, salt and sea breeze combined resulted in a very early evening and a very heavy sleep for us all!

The next day we headed out to explore the northern most “river” that cuts straight across to the sound. We’d done this in ’09 also and remembered that you had a beautiful view from the top of the hill on the other side.

Entering the river

This is a protected area and there’s a 3 knot speed limit. We were disappointed when huge dinghy and jet ski from a mega yacht (here’s looking at you, Mia Elisa) came flying through on plane. Martin chastised them and told them to slow down. We got lots of laughs and our picture taken. Gotta love it when people show so much respect for nature and a national park. Not.

Exiting on the other side

Climbing up the hill

Top of the hill – Camp Driftwood

View to the east, Blossom is a white speck in the distance

View west over the sound

Tropic Bird. This is a terrible pic but they’re gorgeous birds with long tail feathers

Hiking back down

Lizard

The sand felt like talcum powder

On the way back we anchored in the river and had a picnic lunch

We stopped at several coral patches on the way home and did a bit of snorkeling again. I love the shallow bommies, they’re filled with tons of juvie reef fish.  We looked hard for hiding lion fish but didn’t see any. (Not that we’d be allowed to spear them – no fishing in the park, not even lion fish.)

I think it's a very pale honeycomb cow fish

Intermediate French Angelfish

Blue chromie

Butterfly fish

Mom was going to go for a quick swim around Blossom when we got back but we had his guy hanging out under Blossom.

He was about 3 feet long, a big enough barracuda that I didn’t want to jump in! Then we saw 5 remora hanging out as well and figured the nurse shark that had visited us the day before must be nearby. So we nixed the swim. Too much wildlife, we headed in for happy hour J

We had another visitor at dinner time. This guy was bold!

We want to show Mom as much as we can, but not feel too rushed. I was hoping to spend 3 nights in 4 locations but because of the tides, we’ll need an extra day to return to the marina (we need to enter at high tide which is at 10am). So we’ll need to have a shorter visit at one location.

Having had a great 3 nights at Shroud, we got up this morning and left right away for Little Bay, Great Guana.  We’ll spend 2 or 3 nights there and then will start returning north, hopping up to Big Majors after that. After three perfect weather days, the wind is going to pick up a little bit and it’s perfect timing as Little Bay and Big Majors are well protected from E/SE winds.  Now we’ll get to show Mom a small settlement and return to a couple of beautiful snorkeling spots. It’ll also be nice to be connected again, we didn’t have any internet at Shroud and I need to feed my weather addiction!

Boat Business: Too busy playing to attend to maintenance and all systems are working well!

Palm Cay Marina

View from the restaurant at the marina – showing the entrance channel on a windy day

We’re about to wrap up our week at Palm Cay - what a find!  We arrived last Tuesday after a calm ride up from Highbourne Cay, hoping to avoid two huge rainstorms that were behind and ahead of us. Luckily they blew to the east and we had a dry ride.

The entrance to the marina is bit tricky with a long, narrow dredged channel. There are lots of rocks in the channel but it’s supposed to be clear to 8 feet at low tide. It’s a bit disconcerting to be floating over so many corals and rocks in this clear water – they look much closer.

Blossom on her end tie

The marina was pretty full when we arrived. People were taking shelter from the westerly winds in this very protected area.  It has a nice restaurant, a beautiful beach side bar and pool and a courtesy car that you can sign up for and take out for 2 hours at a time for free.  The dockmaster and his assistant are incredibly friendly and accommodating. One the first things we did was to sign up for a car and visit a grocery store, liquor store and ATM. It was nice to provision at a large grocery store with everything you could want there.

Chess anyone?

Our first night at the marina we had cocktails and dinner at the marina restaurant, the Billfish Grill and met a couple living on their Nordy 47.  A few nights later when the rain stopped we had a dinner with Tim & Valerie at the restaurant again, it was “Pizza and Jazz” night. The pizza was tasty and the band and vocalist were very good. We sat on the porch eating pizza and drinking a nice rose, listening to a soulful rendition of a Sade classic. Yup, life is pretty darn good.

Friday afternoon we had watched a cat getting towed into the marina. We met the couple on the boat at happy hour that day and learned that they had hit a bommie on the way in to the marina. Through an unfortunate series of events, they had just lost a prop coming from Spanish Wells and then lost their second one while getting off the rocks. Talk about a bad day!  Saturday morning we helped them line their boat off the fuel dock into a slip. He said he hit a bommie in the channel and they only draw 4 feet. Even though it was low tide, that bommie would be just 7 feet under at high tide. We’re hoping that he was actually out of the channel!

A little squall blowing through :/

The weather was been less than stellar while we’ve been here (yes, that why we were here!) so we’ve really enjoyed being in a marina. On the rainy days we relaxed (sew & video games) and got some chores done. Blossom got a pretty thorough deep clean which was sorely needed. Somehow sand gets everywhere and there’s a coating of salt on everything – the windows, wall, mirrors… Blossom is looking spiffy again in time for my Mom!

We had a couple cool/overcast but dry days so we took advantage of it to take the bikes for a spin. The neighborhood is very nice and we enjoyed riding by the large houses with their manicured lawns. But with no shoulders on the road and lots of traffic it was a bit more exciting than I like. We enjoyed getting to know Tim & Val and had dinners at Billfish, aboard their boat and ours. They’re heading south from here but I hope that our paths will cross again! The week flew by in a blur of rain, wind and comfortable evenings chatting with our new friends. 

My Mom :)

And yesterday my Mom arrived! It’s wonderful to have her here with us. We also had a special dinner this evening with Sean & Louise who were able to make it to Nassau today from Eleuthera. We were so happy that they could get here and that we could have a goodbye dinner aboard Blossom. It feels so weird to be parting ways after over a year together. They’ll be hanging out for a few days in Nassau and then heading east to Bimini and continuing north from there. The cruising world is a small one and I’m sure we’ll be hanging out again soon, but it’s still sad to part ways!

Today we’re going to be heading south for Shroud Cay. It’s supposed to be calm and sunny (finally!) for the next few days and we’re looking forward to being back on the hook and able to explore and play in the water again.  This will be our first time underway with a guest (not a training or delivery captain guest). We’re excited for Mom to experience Blossom underway and to show her the beautiful sites. I can't wait for us to break out the SUPs, snorkels and fins!

Boat Business: A few maintenance items got done this week.

• Inside. I did a serious clean throughout the boat.
• Hull. We had B’s bottom power washed (Her green beard along the waterline was getting quite long.) We’ve never seen this technique done before – usually you scrape/scrub the bottom. The idea is that less paint gets scrubbed off with the power wash. We’ll be diving down and taking a look at the hull once we’re anchored to see how clean she is.
• Gens. Martin did an oil change on both gens.

Raining in the Bahamas

We've had a couple people check in to make sure that we're doing okay with the strange weather in South Florida/the Bahamas. I thought I'd put up a quick post to let everyone know that we're fine!

The potential storm that everyone is watching would be to our north and would be tracking away from us. Hopefully it will get blown out to sea.

The view from our pilot house. The marina entrance faces south. Windy day blowing from the east.

Here in the central Bahamas, there's a severe thunderstorm warning out for the day. Where we are, it's raining like mad and there's a bit of thunder in the distance. Tomorrow is supposed to be lovely!  

I'm very happy that we decided to come in to the marina. We're safely tucked in, enjoying a lazy rainy day and looking forward to a bit of sun tomorrow :)

Little Bay, Great Guana Cay to Palm Cay Marina, New Providence

 

 Entering our anchorage at Little Bay

At anchor, view to the south

Little Bay is the bay just south of Black Point where we stayed on our way down to Georgetown last month. We wanted to go a bit south and check it out – it looked like it could be very pretty. And it was!  The first thing that happened was that our davit broke (as I wrote about in the last post). Things got better after that.

Sean & Louise were anchored at Black Point and Thursday is “cruisers happy hour” at Scorpio’s Bar. So that night we drove Petal up to town to have cocktails and dinner with them.  It turned out that there were a bunch of people at Scorpio’s – an impromptu party of sorts!  We met several couples from boats including Changing Course, Margaritaville, and Spiraserpula and Del Max who we'd been leapfrogging up the Exumas with since Georgetown. After happy hour we went to a restaurant next door, DeShamon, and had pizza.

Heading home from Black Point. The view from the dinghy dock

The next day, Sean & Louise headed out to Eleuthera to take care of some business.  We stayed and got a lot of chores done, including figuring out the davit controller. Friday afternoon we had a real treat when Gayle called us and said that she and Bill were going out snorkeling and asked if we’d like to join them. Martin and I jumped at the opportunity and followed them up at Dotham cut. It was a great snorkel site and to have two marine biologists pointing things out to you was Awesome!  My camera gave me a strange disc warning so I only got a couple of pictures. But in addition to the lobster and turtle we saw a puffer fish, scrawled file fish, brittlestars and more…

Heading out to snorkel off Dotham Cut

Baby hawksbill turtle

Slipper Lobster, his back end, didn’t get a good shot!

Joe & Holly from Scamper came over with their controller that evening and we had a drink together. Unfortunately, their controller didn’t work with our davit but we had a really nice time talking with them. They spend their winters on the west coast of Florida (which I love!) and Holly is a quilter so we had lots to talk about J

SUPing the rocky shoreline

Saturday afternoon I went out on a SUP and explored the bay.  The water was like glass – it was perfection.  Martin and I went back to DeShamon for dinner and had their lobster special. On the way home we checked out the snorkel sites that I had SUP’d over and found 1 small lion fish. It was too late (almost dark) to get him so we’re going to try to find him when we return in a couple weeks.

We planned to stay at Little Bay and wait for our new controller to arrive and then head north to New Providence where we’d pick up my Mom. When the trip to Cuba was cancelled, we gained another 6 weeks to spend in the Bahamas so we thought it would be a perfect opportunity for her to come! It was a last minute decision and I’m so happy that we were able to make it happen on such short notice! We made arrangements for her to fly into Nassau. The plan was to anchor on the SW side of New Providence, where we anchored on the way down from the Abacos, and then dinghy in to pick her up.

But several variables later, and by Saturday night we were making other plans. Most importantly, the davit was working. Then, while we were at happy hour, the folks from Changing Course told us about a marina on the SE side of New Providence. Martin has been pretty adamant about not wanting to go to Nassau but this marina is not in the city and we wouldn’t have to go into Nassau Harbor. It’s reasonably priced and has rave reviews. So now we had a good option to head up early if we needed to and the weather up there wouldn’t be a factor. And finally, the weather factored in. The forecast has been looking pretty chaotic – it seems there’s a “confused weather pattern” currently over the Bahamas. We’re expecting SW/W winds (rare for this time of year) and lots of rain over the next week.  Then Saturday night, we got slammed by some moderate SW winds. By Sunday morning we were hobby horsing so badly in the anchorage (that is completely open to the SW and W winds), that I was sea sick and couldn’t wait to leave.  

Cameras always fail to adequately capture the sea state. These were breaking waves rolling into the anchorage.

With more of the same, and potentially worse to come, we called the marina and found that they had a slip we could fit in that was supposed to come available. We would also be able to provision while up there. There’s a huge Bahamian regatta going on in Georgetown this week and apparently the mailboat (which carries food/fresh produce to the settlements in the Exumas), was hanging out down there. So it was slim pickings for provisioning.  

Party on Blossom at Warderick Wells!

And so we headed north to Warderick Wells on Sunday. Unfortunately, it was no more protected than Little Bay, so we hunkered down and I still wasn’t feeling that great. We couldn't get cell or wifi there to get updated weather info or confirm our marina reservation so we planned to head out to Highbourne the next day where we could be connected.

Monday was more calm and we got to Highbourne Cay and anchored pretty much exactly where we anchored several weeks ago. The only downside was that we had little/no cell reception even though we were anchored right under the tower. It seems that Batelco is having some serious issues throughout the Exumas. (Thankfully the problem started right after we figured out the davit.) Martin was able to get enough reception though to hotspot my phone and we downloaded and updated the weather forecast. We had a large remora visit us in the evening. He swam around the boat for quite a while. We have such a green beard along our waterline, I wondered if he thought he could attach to us! (Yes, bottom cleaning is high on our to-do list once we're out of the marina.)

Tuesday I awoke to distant rumblings. Uh oh, I know that sound. I waited for the sun to rise, listening to louder and louder grumbles. I walked to the cockpit and saw a black wall approaching from the SW. We closed the windows and waited. The wind was blowing at about 4 knots, almost dead calm. Then the water started to ripple oddly and then BAM a 60 knot gust slammed us. Kind of cool really! The sustained gust lasted about 2 minutes and averaged 50k according to our anemometer (or "wind-ometer" as I refer to it).  Blossom whipped around and stared the squall down. Can I tell you how much we love our over-sized Ultra anchor? The only unfortunate outcome was that we forgot to remove our flag and it started to shred again – and I just sewed it up! 

Sugar bird (en route to New Providence)

On our way up to Palm Cay Marina we had a guest come aboard. I remember the sugar birds from back in ’09. They would eat sugar out of your hand. I thought this little guy must be tired, he was so far from land, but he was scared so I helped him find the door. Then I saw “her” partner flying around the boat as well. I hope they landed and took a break on deck if they needed one.

We’re looking forward to spending a few days in a marina, it’ll be quite the change after more than 2 months on the hook. (Our night at Emerald Bay didn’t feel like a real “marina stay”). It’ll be nice to have wifi to catch up on emails and this blog. Our connectivity has been so bad for the past several days that we’ve not been on line much.  I’m also looking forward to a big grocery store and to some fun restaurants. We’ll be snug as a bug in the marina for the two days of strong westerlies and then two days of strong easterlies that are forecast to blow through. It looks like the “confused” weather will be winding down early next week and fingers crossed that we’ll have amazing blue sky and mild winds for my Mom’s visit!

Boat Business:

• Davit. Martin diagnosed & hotwired the davit while I was on line trying to do my share of the research.
• Water makers. Changed the oil in both water makers.
• SSB. I tried to tune in to Chris Parker (weather guru) on the SSB but there was too much static to hear what he was saying. We’ll have to try to play around and figure out if we can turn something off to get the radio to tune in better. I have an “SSB for Idi-Yachts” book I just found. I hope it helps :/
• Air conditioning. We’ve had a few very hot days and have been using our AC. The other night we tried to run it overnight for the first time using the 9k. At some point it stalled out from overload. We think a battery charger came on. Oh, if only we’d put in a 12k instead of a 9k! But we’ll keep playing with it and figure it out. By June we’ll need to run the AC overnight for sure. With no wind, my sleeping comfort level is cut off at about 85 degrees/100% humidity.