Sunday, April 6 — According to the forecast, the wind was going to drastically switch directions on Tuesday. This meant that on Monday, we needed to move someplace with better protection for that type of wind. One of the primary topics of discussions the last few days was about where the best place would be to go.
The two sailboats in our D & D group both had obligations coming up in Georgetown, so they needed to ride out the winds at or near George Town. However, Eric didn’t think any of the anchorages in the George Town area looked like they’d be comfortable during the winds.
Eric decided to head north to an anchorage called Rock Sound on Eleuthera island, and so did Haste Away, the other powerboat in our D & D group. The problem was that Rock Sound was an awkward distance from North Bight, so we wanted to break it up into two hops. The sailboats agreed to go as far north as Fernandez Bay (still on Cat Island) with the powerboats so that the group could have one more day together. From Fernandez Bay, Monday’s run would be 12-hours, so we could do the whole passage in daylight.
As soon as we got up, we started getting the boat ready to go. Since we weren’t going far and we’d be in protected waters the whole way, we didn’t have to be too fastidious about securing stuff. We pulled up anchor at 0830 and dropped anchor in Fernandez Bay at 1045.
The wind was coming from the southeast, and this anchorage was totally protected from that wind direction. However, it was still a bit rolly from the swell coming in from the ocean. We decided not to deploy the flopper stoppers because retrieving them in the morning would cost us too much time.
The Kosmos crew decided to go for a dinghy ride in the estuary (the bottom part of the map above). We’d read that there was quite a bit of wildlife in there. As we’ve mentioned before, we haven’t seen a lot of wildlife in the Bahamas, so we were excited about this opportunity to see some. Here was the anchorage, taken from the dinghy.
The shoreline looked like a line of upper-middle class houses. Apparently, there was a resort in there somewhere, too.
This was the point that we rounded to enter the estuary
Looking back at that point from inside the estuary.
The estuary was a series of waterways between mangrove trees. It felt like a road system. There were several times when we came to forks in the waterway where we had to decide which “road” to take. The waterways were quite shallow in many spots, but oddly, there would be deeper spots right next to the shallow spots.
We did not see much wildlife: a small shark, a couple rays, a few small fish, and a few birds.
After returning from the mangrove adventure, Eric and Keith went over to one of the boats to play D & D. Sunset:
After dinner, Haste Away hosted a get together. We hung out at their boat until 2330, which was a very late night for us. Upon returning to Kosmos, we brought the dinghy up and got things ready to go to sea. We knew we were going to be tired and draggy in the morning, so we figured it was best to have everything done before we went to bed.