The dawn on Sunday, March 23 was stunning
The day that we’d arrived in Elizabeth Harbour, we’d mentioned that there were several Nordhavns in the anchorage. Since then, several more had arrived. With so many Nordhavns in one place, one of the owners, John from Dragon, convinced Nordhavn to do a PR/marketing video of all the boats moving together in formation. The bribe for owners to participate in this video was that Nordhavn would host a happy hour afterwards. We eagerly agreed to participate.
The day before, John had taken shots of all the Nordhavns at anchor. Here was Kosmos.
As soon as we got up, we started getting Kosmos ready to go to sea. We figured that since we had to get the boat ready to go to sea for this PR video, we may as well also make a trip out to the ocean to dump the tanks. We’d really settled in, and in doing so, had pulled a lot of stuff out from deep storage. Getting it all put back away took a while. We also put our circumnavigator pennant on the bow.
At 1100, we pulled up anchor and headed out. We rolled up 46,000 miles on the odometer while we were out on the short trek. We returned to our same spot back at 1300. Since it didn’t look like anyone else was ready to start yet, we dropped anchor and waited for the rally to begin. At 1340, we saw the other boats were starting to move, so we pulled the anchor back up and joined them. Initially, we were in the back of the loosely formed vertical lines.
Navigating these waters was tricky because there were a lot of shallow spots. Evading the shallow spots kept us from making perfect formations.
Via radio, we were directed to congregate together to form a horizontal line. Here were a couple of videos of Kosmos trying to catch up with the rest of the pack.
Apparently, we didn’t do a very good job of staying in the drone shot as we moved forward. Make sure to watch to the end of the clip.
When we finally lined up, we were on the north end.
Once we were done with horizontall photos, we were directed to be the new lead boat on the way back. We turned around and everyone else followed us. Someone commented that it probably wasn’t a wise choice to put people who had never been to Elizabeth Harbour before in charge of navigating the big boats around the narrow spots. But it was all in good fun. Everyone knew Eric was a competent captain.
A new vertical line loosely formed.
The other boats did eventually begin to overtake us, so we weren’t in the lead for long.
We returned to the anchorage a little after 1500 and dropped anchor very close to where we had been before. We quickly got the boat situated, lowered the dinghy down, and headed to Georgetown.
The Exumas Yacht Club was normally closed on Sundays, but they willl open for special events. John had convinced them to open for us. Here is a photo of the exterior of yacht club, located next door to the pizza place.
Eric and Christi had a great time visiting with the other Nordhavn owners/crew. Keith was bored. The mixed drinks were the strong, but tasted like they had no alcohol in them. They were dangerous!
The sun was setting as we drove back to Kosmos.
The Nordhavn PR piece has a lot of photos and a video, so check it out if you’d like to see more from the event. We’d expected Nordhavn to list each boat in the rally, however, they only mentioned two boats by name: Dragon and Kosmos. We’re honored that we were given special mention.