The kids made a towel fort under the cockpit table to hide from the sea spray!
Amazing how unassuming a turquoise sea can look!
Mangrove Cay about a mile out.
Today was one of those "remind me why we are doing this" kind of days. We decided to leave the dock, for a couple of reasons. The first, because it is expensive to stay at the dock and spending $70/night isn't exactly in our budget. Secondly, we really want to be able to be at anchor, and swim/snorkel and kayak off of the boat. Finally, because of both of these reasons we were getting restless. For the past few days the winds have been out of the N-NE 15-25knots, and today it was suppose to be ENE-E 15-20knots. Everyday we inspected from the shore the surf conditions and each day we said to ourselves that it didn't appear to be that bad out there. With all of these factors we decided that we would shove off today.
We got off of the dock and left the inlet without a hitch, and we entered Goodwill Channel and headed into the wind and outgoing tide. The channel is a narrow 2 mile stretch between shoals. Supposedly, it use to have channel markers, but that was before the hurricane took them away. We left at high tide, just to be on the safe side, because we also heard that the shoals had shifted as well since the hurricane. It turned out to be the easiest part of our trip in hind sight. The rest of the trip we were heading into a 18-25 knot wind, and outgoing tide. We were essentially going backwards. At max speed we hit 4 knots a few times, but we were averaging in the low to mid 3 knot range. We were hobby horsing over the waves and taking a fair amount over the bows. We frequently got spray from these waves that came all the way back into the cockpit. Our planned "easy" 40 mile trip to Great Sale Cay, turned into an agonizingly long 20 mile trip to Mangrove Cay. We tried to sail off a little bit, but it didn't really help all that much. Our boat doesn't sail into the wind very well, and we would have had to sail off considerably, and to tack back and forth to get to Mangrove Cay would have been just as long of a day as it was. We never should have used the beach surf as an assessment tool, of course the waves weren't big from the shore, because the water depth is less than 5 ft for at least a mile off shore. In the channel to Mangrove Cay the waves could build a little more because of the deeper water.
Mangrove Cay is basically just that, a small island of mangrove that provided enough protection from the wind for the night. And I got what I asked for, we were at anchor, Chris went swimming off of the boat, he and Deason went kayaking, and after I vented my childish frustrations to Chris I felt better. I have high expectations of the Bahamas, we have been dreaming of coming here since we bought and moved aboard the boat, and I wanted ideal. Ideal being...calm seas, light breeze, easy sailing, and bright sunshine. The bottom line is that there are going to be great days, or a variation of that, and there are going to be bad days. Hopefully, we will use our brains to prevent as many bad days. I do realize that in the grand scheme of things, it could be much worse.
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