I’m bombarding you with posts this season! I’ve been in the mood and have had the time. It’s a good use of passage-making time. Most of our passages have been 2-3 hours with an occasional longer one. Today we are cruising from South Palmetto Point to Rock Sound Harbor, about 23 nm and 6 hours. It’s a good time to get ahead.
I’m going to back up to late April/early May when we were still in the Spanish Wells area. If you’ve been following us this season, you know my folks left on April 26th to return home. After we saw them off, we dropped the dock lines at Yacht Haven Marina and cruised to the Atlantic side of Egg Island to do some snorkeling because the seas were actually calm on the ‘outside.’ We snorkeled a couple of times on our own. After our second day of snorkeling we stopped by a new catamaran in the anchorage, SV Breathe, and chatted with Jason & Monica for a bit, arranging to join them for appetizers and sundowners on their boat later in the day. We did do that, and had a great time with them and their buddy boat friends, Cindy & Ron on @SV Reef’n It!
The next day we all snorkeled together. There was a bit more swell and lower visibility, but we still saw some great stuff. Jason takes amazing underwater photos; check out his web page or Facebook page @BreatheSailDive. That evening we had them all over to Indigo Lady for appetizers and drinks and a tour of our boat. They were also able to give us some intel about things to see and do on our way along Eleuthera, which has paid off in spades. We exchanged social media contacts so we could stay in touch, and they headed back to their boats a little after 8pm. Cruisers lament- meet cool people and then have to part ways (I’m sure I’ve said that before). They were heading off for the Abacos the following morning. Sigh. Hopefully our paths will cross next season.
On the last day of April, we moved to anchor off Current Settlement on the southern end of North Eleuthera. This put us in position to pass through Current Cut, between North Eleuthera and Current Island, with the proper tide because it can have a wicked current a boat like ours doesn’t want to go against. We walked through the tiny settlement to sit outside their library, closed that day, to use their WiFi. We were still having data issues at the time, so we took any chance at free WiFi we could get.
Passing through the cut the next morning was smooth, but the cruise to the Glass Window anchorage was a bit bumpy; not horrible, just not comfortable. It was a nice, calm anchorage though and we arrived in time for lunch followed by a walk ashore. We landed the dingy on the beach and followed a short trail to Queens Hwy to find we were directly across from one of the natural wonders we wanted to see- Queen’s Bath. This is a large area of basically very large tide pools carved out of the limestone from years of bashing by the sea. One can only go down into the baths at low tide and as long as the waves aren’t still crashing and spraying. We got the low tide, but the sea was quite active and we didn’t have the best footwear to climb down anyway, so we appreciated the beauty and awesome power of nature from the top.
We next walked a little further north to Glass Window Bridge. This is a very narrow isthmus just north of Gregory Town and east of Lower Bogue where you can see simultaneously the Atlantic on one side and the Bight of Eleuthera on the other. The Atlantic side sports 80-foot cliffs. In the 1800s it was topped by a rocky ledge (Winslow Homer painted this), which has long since been destroyed by hurricanes. The succession of manmade bridges haven’t fared much better over time. There is no reef to break the waves from the Atlantic side, so storms at sea often create waves that funnel themselves into the narrow Atlantic-side cliffs throwing up waves that wash over the bridge to the Bight of Eleuthera on the other side. Over the years they have occasionally taken an unsuspecting car and/or person over with them (here’s one such story). We were fortunate to see it on a calm day, so we could safely walk across it to take pictures from both sides. My pictures don’t do it justice.
After Glass Window we started our walk back to dingy but decided to go a little past it to see if we could find the restaurant/bar rumored to be nearby. Half a mile later we were sitting at Daddy Joe’s enjoying conch fritters and mac ‘n cheese sticks, along with a drink called a Kerpunkle, which we learned is Bahamian slang for shit-faced. Aptly named, because the drink was strong with rum. Yum! Our ‘snack’ was large and late in the afternoon, so dinner on board was cheese and crackers and fruit.
We’d planned to go back to Queen’s Bath the next day, but dingy needed a patch repair and we wanted to give it a solid 24 hours to set before using it again. So we stayed aboard all day. I made English muffins and did three loads of laundry while Dave patched dingy and did some other stuff. We lazed away the afternoon in the hammocks. The following day, May 3, we moved back through Current Cut to the Spanish Wells side. More about that in my next post. For now, enjoy this video slideshow of the sights described here, stay safe and take care of each other.
Life on Lady 