Nassau in the rear view mirror

Due to limited band width pix will be uploaded later.

After considerable deliberation about the weather we launched from our slip and made the approximately 30 nm trip from Nassau to Highbourne Cay in the northern Exumas in about 5 hours. Winds were blowing in the upper teens and low twenties for most of the trip. Instead of taking the rhum line we opted to take the route around the Yellow Bank because with the sea state, visibility for coral heads was limited due to the poor water clarity caused by the rough conditions. Leaving Nassau Harbor was slow as we secured all of our docking gear and worked into the flow of traffic until we got clear of the narrow passage and turned south.

Winds were out of almost true north and the first leg of the trip was almost due south so we were almost dead downwind and given the proximity of coral heads we had reefed sails to go slow so that we could pick our way through the Yellow Bank. After we cleared the Bank and turned southeast we went to full sail and increased our speed running between 7.5 and 8.5 knots for that leg. We were being lazy and didn’t use our staysail as we were enjoying the sail and didn’t need the extra speed. There was a lot of chop and some fairly good size waves for the shallow water.

Highbourne Cay is a very popular anchorage and there are probably 20 boats anchored here. There is some protection from the north wind but the wind is supposed to clock around to the east overnight and this should provide good protection. In any event the chop is not too bad here so it is comfortable. We anchored in about 15 feet of water and our anchor caught pretty quickly.

There really isn’t much to do on this Cay so we will head further down the coat to Shroud Cay tomorrow. The trip is less than 10 miles so no need to start early. With an east wind it should be an easy sail. From here it is an island to island hop down to Georgetown, the principal town in the Exumas. No hurry to get there and we’re looking for some islands with privacy so we’ll take our time. We can spend as much or as little time at each place as we want. We’re looking for the deserted secluded beach and hopefully we’ll find it.

After the front passed on Saturday the weather got really chilly. Today the high was only in the 70’s. We expect it to warm up back into the 80’s because we want to get into the water and enjoy some of the beaches. Water temp is near 80 but coming out into cool temps is not fun.  But, it’s warm enough to swim in for some exercise which I will do when we get some sunny days.

This morning when we checked out of the marina I finally got the fuel bill from when we checked in. We used almost 43 gals of fuel for 34 hours of motoring. A rate of 1.26 gals/hr. So far for the entire trip since we fueled up in Herrington Harbour we’ve burned about 1.57 gal/hr which seems relatively good considering we burned about 1.3 gal/hr in our 380 that was a smaller boat with a smaller engine. We average at least 7 kts an hour so with our 160 gal tank we have a range of over 700 miles. 

Hopefully we never need to motor that far but it’s nice to know and given the price in the Bahamas we may be able to make it back to the US before needing to top off. Although 2 months is a long time to let the tank low. We have 5 gals in a jerry can and if we don’t use a lot we might be fine. Today we didn’t motor more than an hour in total. We haven’t run our generator much so that hasn’t been a factor. We did run it the other night for AC when the power was off. But, it only burns about .25 gal/hr so no big deal there. We don’t have that many hours on it yet but maybe we will have more now that we will be on the hook more.

In Nassau we saw lots of mega yachts in our marina and coming and going in the Harbor. Today on the way down we saw several and there are quite a few anchored here with us. One in particular pulled in just before sundown and anchored right where we want to take sundown photos so you will see it in our sundown pix.

Tonight for dinner Linda made her very great pasta dinner complete with one of our remaining bottles of truly great wine that we had from when we had a house. It was a bottle of Del Dotto Clay Pot Zinfandel 2009 that we bought in Napa Valley. It had not lost one iota of flavor in spite of the move from our wine cooler to the boat and then to this boat. We are sorry to see the end of that purchase.  It is difficult to buy good wines for the boat since we don’t have a good storage for them. So we are limited to wines we can keep or wines we can buy and consume fairly quickly. Good wines quickly degrade in warm temps.

We spent about 10 days in Nassau and will be spending more later in April when some friends come to visit. Despite all the bad cruiser press we enjoyed our time there. Lots of good restaurants, good shopping and the people were very friendly. There are a variety of marine supply stores that I found to have needed stock. As I think I discussed earlier it is no different than other tropical cities. If you don’t like Nassau, don’t go to any city on Hispaniola, Central America, South America, the Virgin Islands, most Caribbean islands, New York or Florida. They are as bad or worse. I agree that it is not my idea of Paradise, but any place that’s warm, has palm trees and friendly people can’t be all bad.