fetchinketch

Jim and Laura are settled in and enjoying their vacation.  Around the docks there are lots of fish, with the larger predators especially active at night when the tide is running fast. You can frequently hear them splashing as they attack something smaller and unfortunate.  They have been driving Jim to distraction, because other than one smallish horse-eyed jack, he hasn’t been able to land any.

Yesterday the four of us took the dinghy over to Little Water Cay, a part of the Turks and Caicos extensive park system.  This particular island is devoted to the maintenance of the local population of the rock iguana:

A rock iguana on the beach.

The iguanas rule the island, there are thousands of them.  Unlike the ones we saw in the Bahamas (a different, but closely related species) these are not feed by visitors to the island.  They don’t come running up to you and beg (as much as a lizard can beg), but being fully protected, they have no fear of humans and make no effort to get out of your way.

The island, like most of the uninhabited islands in the chain, is small, low to the water, and almost all sand with beautiful beaches on all sides.

Of course, it is the tropics, and if there isn’t a breeze blowing it can be quite warm, so sometimes you just have to find the best shade you can…

Not all of the lizards on the island are large iguanas. We saw these little guys were sunning themselves as well.

Karen, Bill, Jim, Laura On the beach. Little Water Cay, Turks and Caicos Islands

Cruising your sailboat to exotic locations means you get to do all your maintenance and repairs in exotic locations! I feel like I am almost caught up.  I have an oil change on the generator left to do, and then the cycle starts over again! Having a boat with all kind of modern conveniences is great, but every piece of gear comes with a manual that lists its maintenance needs. Individually it never seems like much, but if you have 300 pieces of gear and each one requires maintenance of sort sort once a year, you almost have a full time job. And that’s not even counting any repairs that might be needed.

We are in the Blue Haven Marina on the east end of Providenciales.  A beautiful marina, with easy access to the ocean. Unusually in this part of the world, it has floating docks. Since the tide range hear is small, about 2 feet, very few marinas invest in the luxury of floating dock pontoons. Somethings are a bit pricey. Electricity, for example, is metered at the boat, and costs $0.60/kW-hr, about 4 or 5 times what you would pay stateside. Here on the desert island water costs $0.12/gallon, so you wash the boat with a bit of water economy you might not otherwise use.

When we first cleared in the the Turks and Caicos through customs and Immigration, they cleared us in for seven days. Today we finished the process of getting out Cruising permit from Customs that allows us to keep the boat here for 30 days without paying an import duty, and our 30 day visas from Immigration. So now we are “Legal” until the end of February.

This afternoon my brother and his wife will be flying in and joining us for a week or so.  Hopefully we can get some good fish catching done while he is here.

Right now we have typical tropical weather:  Sunny, with some very widely scattered showers around, temperatures in the low 80’s during the heat of the day, and a delightful cooling breeze.  In the bar at the resort yesterday they had a sports channel on the big screen.  The featured event was some kind of snowboarding competition.  It was truly jarring. My first thought was, “Where is there snow in the middle of summer?”  Then I remembered, “Oh, Yeah…”

We are now in the Turks and Caicos Islands with an internet connection, albeit a slow and unreliable one, but hopefully I can get caught up on some pictures and stories.

Let’s start with this picture of one of the more unusual private yachts we have seen.  the Pink Shrimp.  At first glance she looks like an oceangoing commercial fishing boat, and certainly that is what the hull was designed as.  One of the surprising things we have noticed about the very high end super yachts is that very few of them have much in the way of creative design in their external appearance.  This boat at least has character

Pictures of fish from the trip out to Mayaguana:

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Mayaguana was an interesting place, and one where we would like to spend more time exploring.  Late every afternoon, we had a visitor to the boat in the anchorage…

Each day a 6 foot nurse shark spend several minutes carefully checking us out.  It wasn’t clear if it was used to being fed from boats, or if we were just on its afternoon “commute” route and were worth a closer look out of curiosity.  Things we missed, the windward beaches are supposed to have some of the best shell collecting in the world, and the lagoons on the windward side have great bonefishing.  Next time!

When you arrive in a new country, the first thing they want to see is the paperwork from the LAST country you were in to be sure that you checked out legally and are not on the run from the law. So we visited the tiny one room building on Mayaguana that serves as the office for Customs, Immigration, Police headquarters, Tax collector, Department of Education, and who knows what all else.  When we told the women behind the counter that we were there to check out, her first response was that we had to wait for her boss to be in the office to do that.  When it turns out we need to leave that afternoon, and he won’t be there until maybe tomorrow, well, OK, maybe she can do it herself. But wait!  The electricity is off… how can she check us out without electricity to run the office machines?  Carbon paper to the rescue!  Eventually we get all the proper papers stamped and we are free to leave the country.

The wind faded away in the early night and we had a slower than expected trip to the Caicos Islands, arriving about 13:00.  We called the marina on the radio so they could send out a guide boat to help us in through the long, complex, and narrow channel.  We were told we had missed the tide, and would have to wait until about 17:00 to come in so we just sailed around the bay for the afternoon.

Close to 5PM the marina’s guide boat hailed us on the radio, and met us at the cut in the reef:

Turtle Cove Marina Guide Boat ready to lead us in.

Why the guide boat?  Well, to start with missing the entrance into the reef could ruin your whole day.  Here is what you see on both sides of your boat as you come in the reef break:

Then there is about a half mile of twisting channel before you get into the marina itself.  It is well marked, and actually marked better than most of the places we have been in the islands, but there is not much room for error.  We scraped bottom twice as we came in, but ended up inside safe and sound, and quite tired from a long day and night.

Time 21:30 local
Lat N 22° 21.5′
Lon W 72° 59.1′
Eastern end of Abrahams Bay, Mayaguana, Bahamas

We moved over to the eastern end of Abrahams Bay, about 4 miles to be closer to town, and to be in a more protected part of the bay for the passage of the cold front coming through tonight. Which is happening right now as the wind is blowing at 30 knots gusting to 35. By morning it should be calming down again.

Calling the settlement of Abrahams Bay a “town” is a bit of a stretch. At night we can see the lights on shore. You can count them and you don’t need all your fingers and toes to keep track.

We have one project tomorrow, and that is to visit the Customs office and check out of the Bahamas. If we can get that done early enough, we might head out for the Caicos, but that might happen Wednesday. If we stay here an extra day we might take a chance to tour the island a bit.

The trip over to Providenciales is about 50 miles, and we want to be sure we arrive during daylight, so we need to leave between midnight and 10AM.

Time 17:21 local
Lat: N 22° 19.8′
Long: W 73° 28.1′
Abrahams Bay, Mayaguana, Bahamas

We are safely anchored in Abrahams Bay on the south side of Mayaguana. The sun is setting, the water is gin clear and flat calm, and there are dolphins playing around the boat. Pretty perfect.

We had an uneventful trip last night sailing when we had wind, motoring slowly when we didn’t. We arrived off the northeast corner of Mayaguana at sunrise as planned. Most of the morning we spent fishing while. waiting for the sun to get high enough in the sky that navigating into the shallows around the reef by eye was easier. On our first pass by the south west corner of the island we had a strike on one of the deep lines. We got the boat stopped, and Karen took care of the other lines while I held on and watched my line disappear off the reel–very, very fast.

Nothing to do but hold on as 1000 yards of 50 pound test line scream out into the ocean. The amount on the spool kept getting smaller and smaller. I have never had a fish take all of my line before, and this one looked like it was setting up to do just that. Seeing no evidence that this freight train was even thinking about slowing down, I tightened the drag, risking breaking the line, but hoping to turn him around. Nothing changed… so I tightened it some more… still no change. Now I am down to the last 50 yards or less of line, when everything stops and goes slack. He’s gone. Even empty, reeling in all the line from the spool is tiring. When I get to the end, there is the whole lure and rig, slightly chewed up, but otherwise none the worse for wear.

What was it? I have no idea. I have caught really large wahoo, and they are that fast, but have no where near that much stamina. A big billfish? Or large tuna? All possible, but it will just stay “the one that got away.”

Later in the morning we caught a small albacore, and a skipjack tuna. Fresh fish for dinner!

Time 20:00 local
Lat N 22° 56.4′
Long W 73° 40.4′
Enroute to Mayaguana

The wind has continued to be a bit fickle. Fading to nothing in the hours before sunrise, so we motored most of the day, but it has returned and we are back under sail on our last leg toward our destination. Light wind are moving us at 3 to 4 knots. Slow, but if we went faster we’d arrive at Mayaguana before sunrise, and just have to wait for good light to pick our way into the anchorage.

After traversing what seemed an empty ocean yesterday, more evidence of life was around us today. Birds, pilot whales, fish strikes on our trolled lines. We had two wahoo hit, but missed hookups, what was likely a mahi-mahi broke off when the line tangled on the strike, and we landed a rather large barracuda. Unfortunately for us barracuda, especially large ones caught near offshore reefs, are likely carriers of the toxin the causes ciguatera poisoning so we let him off the hook.

Speaking of offshore reefs, we hooked the barracuda as we approached Samara Cay. As I am fighting the fish, I can see the bottom over the side of the boat. Now that’s not an immediate problem. The water here is really clear, and the sonar says it is 42 feet deep. The problem is the chart says it is supposed to be over 400 feet deep at this spot. It seems the reef is almost 3/4 mile away from its charted position. Another lesson, safely learned!

Time 01:15 local
Lat: N 23° 37.7′
Long: W 75° 06.6′
Enroute to Mayaguana, Bahamas

After an early start, we motored most of the day in what would charitably be described as “light” winds. As the moon rose just after midnight, so also rose the wind. Right now we are on a comfortable beam reach in 10 knots of wind making 6 knots straight toward our destination in flat seas. Glorious! At this rate we’ll be arriving at Mayaguana early tomorrow morning.

If we did not have to stop in Mayaguana to check out of the Bahamas I’d continue straight on the the Caicos!

Sometimes getting the right weather wind to make a passage is less about waiting, and more about being ready when opportunity knocks. The forecast toward the end of this week is looking a bit gnarly, so if we had stayed to play for two days it would likely have cost us well over a week.

If the weather follows the models this time tomorrow will see a high pressure ridge drop down from the north and push the tradewinds far to the south of us.  It looks like several days of light and variable winds.

Based on that we expect to be underway out into the ocean about noon tomorrow to cover the 240 miles or so to Mayaguana.  Depending on which model is “more right” we could end up motoring for most of the 2 days it will take us to get to there. There is a place or two along the way that might tempt us to stop if the weather is settled enough, but Plan A is to to go all the way in one straight shot.

Lat:  N 24º 10.92′
Lon: W 76º 27.69′
Big Majors Spot, Bahamas

Today we sailed about 30 miles south on the “inside”, that is , west of the Exuma Cays on the shallower water of the Bahamas Bank.  It was a great sail, close reaching and close hauled all the way in 20 to 25 knots of wind in a short, steep chop, at boatspeeds of 7 to 9 knots.  Sort of like sailing back in San Francisco, except with clear blue water and warm wind!  A short video…

We are now anchored off Pig Beach, so named because there are semi-tame pigs here on the island who expect every boat and dinghy to bring them food, and will swim out to meet them. They have become quite the tourist draw, to the extent that there are other islands who are promoting their own swimming pigs.  But these are the “Real, Original” swimming pigs–if that matters.  We haven’t been ashore yet to get pictures and close-up experience, although there are definitely pigs on the beach.  And chickens too.  Bacon and eggs anyone?

Our weather outlook is very good. In two days the forecast is for the trade winds to die off, giving us the chance to make good time to the south and especially to the east. I expect we will be taking a two day ocean passage all the way to the island of Mayaguana, our last stop in the Bahamas.

Another of the most beautiful places ever!

And here is a slideshow of the pictures from our exploring yesterday I promised…

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Lat: N 24 31.6′
Long: W 76 47.8′
West side of Shroud Cay, Bahamas

Yesterday we had a delightful sail down from our previous stop. We took the ocean side–hoping to snag a fish, but that wasn’t to be.

Today we did a little exploring around the island of Shroud Cay which is part of the Exumas Land and Sea National Park. There is a shallow winding cut all the way from the Bank side to the Ocean side. Lined with mangroves it was a beautiful dinghy ride to the amazing empty beach on the ocean. On the way Karen spotted her first Bahamas sea turtle. We expect to get pictures posted tomorrow when we hope to have an internet connection.

We’d spend a lot more time here snorkeling and further exploring, but we want to be further south to catch a coming weather window. Our challenge here is we need to move quite a bit East to get to the Turks and Caicos Islands. When the trade winds are hollowing at 20 knots out of the east every day that’s not so easy.

In three or four days we expect a break in the trades, and we’ll take advantage of that to get as far to the East as we can, certainly to Rum Island, maybe as far as San Salvador.