Little Harbour Cay — Cupcake Afloat

Well, it has been a pretty eventful few days. We decided to head south from Great Harbor Cay to experience more of the Berries and to get out of that busy metropolitan environment. After all, we are country mice at heart.

The problem we made for ourselves was that a series of cold fronts are moving through the Bahamas and we needed to find an anchorage with protection from all directions and enough depth for Cupcake with her modest 4’ 6” draft. Not such an easy task in the Berries. (Don’t forget that we were in an anchorage with 360 degree protection and enough depth. The holding wasn’t ideal, however, and we got a little antsy.)

(Landlubbers: holding is what we say when we are talking about how good the bottom of an anchorage is for an anchor to grab. Some kinds of sand are great, some are less great. Grass is generally lousy. Rock is pretty awful. Mud is usually wonderful but almost always messy and sometimes awful. A great bottom can be ruined if there’s too much junk down there. (Get your mind out of the gutter, I’m talking about old chains and cinderblocks and stuff like that). Also, a cold front down here is not really cold…maybe the temperature will drop from the low 80s to the low to mid 70s. The real issue is the wind. It blows much harder than usual from all the points of the compass (but not all at once, of course).)

For this series of fronts, we left Great Harbour Cay when the winds were predicted to be in the high teens from the east. Instead we found winds in the low 20s from the ESE. The reason that difference matters is that we were sailing south, so wind which was more east and less south would have made for better sailing. We had to go about 12 miles north then east before we could head south. Once we got to the outside of the protection of Stirrup Cay and Great Harbour Cay the waves were big and the wind was bigger. The sail down was lively and wet. Some crew members were more nervous than they would have preferred. We think we all need to toughen up and remember that this is what sailing on the open ocean is like. I don’t mean to sound like a martinet, I mean that we all have gotten a little complacent and comfortable, but this adventure of ours is not always rainbows and unicorns. To get the rainbows, sometimes we need to enjoy the challenges.

Check out how the dried salt on deck reflects the light of the camera flash. Our last two sails were pretty wet ones and when the seawater dried, the boat was left coated with salt. It rained early this morning so things are a little cleaner today.

We dropped anchor off tiny Fowl Cay between Hoffmans Cay and Devils Cay. There were about six other boats in the anchorage, all had made the same travel decision we did because the weather is predicted to deteriorate as the week progresses. We all needed to get somewhere safe from the strong west winds that were coming.

When Ellen and I dove on the anchor, it was clearly it not well set. (Landlubbers, a well set anchor is one that is buried in the bottom. Most of the time we don’t have the luxury of diving to take a look at the anchor, so we spend the night hoping for the best. In the Bahamas where the water is clear and warm and the depths at which we anchor are shallow, we dive pretty much every time.) Our pal Pablo was just caught on a piece of limestone at 15’, not dug into anything because the holding was lousy…it’s called a scoured bottom when the currents wash out all the sand and leave just the limestone bedrock behind.

So we (Ellen) hauled the anchor up and we moved to a sandy patch (we could tell it was a sandy patch because we could see the bottom was a more blue-white than grey-white…we are still refining our bottom-reading-skills). I dove on the anchor and it was set really well, but we were too close to a shallow spot. So up the anchor came again. The third time we backed on the anchor (landlubbers: backing on the anchor is when we put the boat into reverse after the anchor is down on the bottom and the chain is paid out. Reversing the boat pulls, gently, on the anchor and encourages it to set) we could feel it skittering over the rock, catching and then releasing. Suddenly it grabbed with such tenacity that it nearly knocked me off my feet. Well. Set.

I was too cold (and, frankly, demoralized) to dive on it again so Ellen did. She said that enough of Pablo’s point had dug into the bottom that we were hooked well enough for the night. But we were a little uncertain about long-term holding.

One of the reasons I was demoralized is that on the sail down, we couldn’t figure out why our speed wasn’t higher, given the strong wind we had. We also though we had a problem with the autopilot because it couldn’t steer straight, rather it kept veering to starboard. (Landlubbers, port is left…each word has four letters.) Turns out the shiny new chain stopper failed for some reason and so did the safety line Ellen ties to the anchor to keep it from jumping out of its place. So we sailed the whole way with Pablo dragging in the sea from 25’ of chain. We are extremely fortunate we didn’t lose all the chain and anchor, we are extremely fortunate Pablo didn’t hook on anything along the way, we are extremely fortunate Pablo didn’t hit the propeller or rudder. Yikes. Anyway, we are reassessing how we secure the anchor.

After speaking with a sailor at Fowl Cay, we learned we would be able to sneak Cupcake into the shallow, narrow, but very protected harbor at Little Harbour Cay. Bill (the sailor) offered to guide us in at high tide the next morning. So Ellen, Moss, and I woke up with the sun to catch the rising tide at Little Harbour Cay. Bill was there to meet us in his dinghy and he guided us in to what we though was a deep enough spot. At high tide, the route in to the anchorage brought us over some very skinny water. We saw some 5’6” spots. No big deal for our draft until you remember the tide would fall 3’ in another few hours. (Turns out, that 3’ tide was the biggest for a month. Getting out later in the week may be a little tricky.)

We hooked Pablo well, dove on the anchor, checked the depths around the boat and felt mostly good about it. Then we joined Bill for a tour of his boat and a walk on the island.

We have been asking people, “if you had a parrot, what phrase would it repeat because it hears it so much on your boat?” On Cupcake the parrot would say “I farted.”

Bill said his parrot says “Daddy.” Because he has a parrot. So we got to meet our first parrot of the trip. (Landlubbers and everyone else: if you have a bird on your boat, don’t let it fly around wherever it wants. Birds poop EVERYWHERE!”) Bill is a solo-sailor, if you hadn’t guessed.

We got back from our afternoon to find Cupcake hard aground. Hard. Aground. She was about 6” short on water. We dug out a trough so her rudder was free and then just waited for the tide to come in. And we kind of panicked about where we would move her because two groundings a day for several days was out of the question.

Taking Mr. Flowerpot we scoped out a deep spot a quarter mile away. After another fairly sleepless night, we woke up Sunday morning and moved with the rising tide to a spot that gives us about a 12” margin at low tide. But because the deep spot is so tiny, we needed to do some pretty tricky anchoring to ensure Cupcake stays in the safe spot.

We are hanging on what’s called a Bahamian moor. Pablo is set to the south to hold us in place as the wind blows from that direction. The second anchor (which Moss named Fortunata) is set to the west to hold us when the wind begins blowing from there. We have a third line running to some old mooring junk on the bottom, holding us against the south-flowing outgoing tide.

When we leave this anchorage, we will need to do so on a rising, nearly full tide. That’s stressful stuff. But as we just discussed with Moss, it is making us better, braver, tougher sailors. It will also make the wifi and hot showers we anticipate in Nassau when we pick up Simon and Zachary that much more of a treat.

Saturday night we joined Eyra and Charisma and Delta Phase at Flo’s Conch Shack for dinner. The company was excellent, the food was good enough. Traditional Bahamian fare seems to be mediocre, fried, and expensive. The beer was $6/bottle! I will stick with the culinary treats on Cupcake, thank you.

We’ve been doing a ton of swimming, saw a bunch of stingrays and sea turtles all day. Those turtles are speedy quick.

Now that we have our anchor setup squared away, we enjoyed our first good night’s sleep in a few days. Tuesday we think we will move out of Little Harbour on the high tide then anchor in the reasonably protected area near the harbor entrance until Wednesday when we will attempt the sail to Nassau. In the meantime we get to relax today and enjoy all our hard work. There are a few little beaches that need investigating.

There’s no wifi here and the cell connection is tenuous, so pictures in quantity will have to wait until Nassau. In the entire Berries island chain there are only two cell phone towers. One is on Great Harbour Cay and the other is on Chubb Cay. Right now we are centered between the two in a nearly dead zone. We are, however, close enough to Chubb Cay to pick up VHF radio traffic. It’s just garbled enough that we think “Chubb Cay, Chubb Cay, the is the vessel Knotty Boy” is actually someone hailing Cupcake.

Cruising tip of the day: learn the difference between windward and leeward, particularly when you are tossing a bowl of dried oatmeal overboard. Moss might have more to say about this issue in her next blog post.