Making the jump to Georgetowm via Staniel Cay and Big Galliot Cay, March 16-20, 2022

    Life on a sailboat demands careful attention to the weather.  The winds dictate most everything.  Too much wind from any direction and you'd like to be finding a nice place to hide away from the wind.  Too little wind and you are trying to be as open to the wind as possible to capture what breeze you can so that you stay cool.  When the wind is in that desirable middle range, you are looking to see if it might blow in the right direction so that you can hoist the sails and move for free in the direction the wind carries you.  Georgetown is pretty much the most popular place in all of the Exumas for cruising sailboats.  The past few weeks, the "official" count has been between 350 and 400 sailboats in the harbors there.  We have some enthusiasm for the idea of being in a place where there is a lot of support and have some anxiety about being crowded in since our goal is sort of getting away from all that drama.  Love it or hate it, you can't ignore Georgetown and we have been determined to check it out.  We have a fixed date on our calendars to meet my sister and most of her family in early April, so our opportunities to get to Georgetown are somewhat limited.  However, we saw on the weather forecasts a solid day where the winds would be blowing constantly from the Northeast around 15-20 knots, which would be absolutely great for a nice sail down to Georgetown.  We're pretty sure we will find good conditions to come back since winds from the southeast seem to be on offer almost every week.  We decided to take advantage of what Mother Nature had planned and make the leap down to Georgetown.

If it seems to you that we make sure to end every day with a cocktail and watch the sunset
you'd be wrong.  Sometimes we have a glass of wine instead.

     Our first order of business was to move offshore of Staniel Cay to figure out how we could best transport my family and their luggage when they arrive in a few weeks.  We've been trying to stay on the docks at the actual yacht club, but have thus far been thwarted in our attempts to do so.  This is the first time I've been unable to secure a marina berth anywhere in the Bahamas even though I tried more than a month in advance.  It does look like if we anchor very close, we should be able to make the jump in the dinghy without soaking any of our guests luggage or persons.  We found a nice mooring ball with a reasonable fee and the dinghy ride is a very smooth one taking not more than 10 minutes or so.  Once you get to the Yacht Club, they have a very nice restaurant and bar that is absolutely the social hub of the anchorage.  We had good chats with a variety of boat types and I don't think we were even there more than an hour.

It really is the case that time pretty much stands still here.  I'm told the island hasn't changed
much from the days when they filmed Thunderball here,  The bar with the cast gathered
in the photo is certainly mostly unchanged.

    Lisa joined me on a walk around town and hit both the pink and blue stores.  As has become my habit I purchased one of the gauzy long sleeve shirts that are popular with fair skinned sailors like me.  They aren't really any hotter than short sleeves and they really help prevent that nasty sun from cooking your arms.  I've bought maybe 3 of them and I don't plan to stop buying more!  We had a pleasant day in the harbor and even got in some D&D playing over zoom.  The nephews will be pleased with the internet service at Staniel.  It isn't always so reliable in the islands and I'm also not sure how well it will work when there are 6 of us sharing the same cell signal.

Staniel Cay Yacht Club seen from the mooring field.

      Once we got ourselves up and about on the 19th, we made our way south towards Big Galliot Cay, which was where we planned to stage for the jump to Georgetown.  Although we have done many overnight sails by now, it is preferable to sail during the day.  Making it all the way from Staniel to Georgetown would likely require arriving too late in the day to feel safe finding an anchorage, especially given the information above that we would be sharing the harbor with 400 other boats.  There is a further complication that hasn't come up for us so far.  The Exumas have too options for sailboats -- inside or outside.  Inside means that you are sailing on the calmer, flatter waters of the Exuma Banks.  Water Depth rarely exceeds 20-30 feet and waves are often 1 to 2 feet.  The outside is basically in the open Atlantic and conditions can be anywhere from sedate to insane.  It all depends on the wind speed and direction.  Furthermore there are only limited places where you can cross from inside to outside.  These gaps in the islands are known as "cuts" because they are cuts in the chain of islands open to the ocean waters.  Movement of water through these cuts is governed by tides and water rushes in as the tide comes in and rushes back out as the tide ebbs.  When the direction of the water is opposite the direction of the winds, it can generate huge standing waves in the cuts and become extremely dangerous.  It is therefore important to time your approach to these cuts to coincide with desirable conditions.  Many people aim for slack tide, when the tide is either all the way at high or all the way at low and current through the cut is minimal.  If you don't do that, you just want to the current and the wind working together.  We did all our calculations and decided a move to Big Galliot Cay was the perfect staging ground.  It would leave us with an easy sail the next day of 6 or 7 hours and provide nice protection from the winds for the night before.

In this tiny anchorage, the closest boat to us had a familiar name.

     When we arrived in the anchorage, expecting to find it nearly empty, we instead found a half dozen boats already nestled in for the night.  We took a look around and found a spot that looked like it would work, but once we dropped the anchor, we were concerned that if the winds shifted we would be too close to the shore.  So, we pulled up the anchor and moved a little bit further out.  We though this would be fine, but our arrival sparked a conversation on the radio.  The boat in front of us informed us that although he was facing south, his anchor was actually 50 feet north of his boat.  His native language was pretty clearly French and I wasn't quite sure if he thought we were as a result too close to him.  Another boat chimed in to say that the current was quite strong and he was being pushed the wrong way and was unable to lower his sail.  He also noted that he thought we were being blown over our anchor as well.  He was interested to know when the tide changed.  This led to an extended discussion in which at least four boats all had a different idea of when the tide would be.  This can be a problem in the Exumas, where just because a web site confidently proclaims high tide to be at 4:43pm you can't be absolutely sure because another site might just as confidently insist it was at 6:12pm.  There was also a lot of confusion about which web sites had updated themselves for daylight savings time.  I assured my French neighbor that I would wander out in the dinghy and take a peek at both of our anchors and assess how close I thought we would get.

I never get over how absolutely gorgeous the water is here in the Bahamas.

     Once I dropped the dinghy, it turned out to be quite easy to find our anchor, because we were sitting right bang on top of it.  I drove out to our neighbor's boat and saw his anchor was indeed behind him, but we had a good 175 feet between the two anchors and we both had less than 75 feet of chain.  So even if our boats somehow moved in completely opposite directions, I didn't think we could touch.  When I drove in the dinghy to chat, he explained that he wasn't worried, he was just trying to be helpful and explain that the wind and current were acting in opposition so that I would understand the situation.  He wasn't mad or worried at all and we had a nice talk about our joint plan to head to Georgetown.  He intended to get up at 6am to leave because that was when the slack tide at low water was supposed be (although he was concerned about the wide variety of opinions about the tide charts).  I told him what my charts said and suggested we watch to see if the tide soon started to rise again as my chart predicted.  Meanwhile, someone another boat had dinghied over to talk to Lisa.  He was concerned that we not allow ourselves to be bullied off our spot because he was sure we were perfectly well anchored and the French guy was being dramatic.  Lisa didn't know that I had already squared things away with the French guy and just told him that we didn't mind if the guy was nervous we were happy to move in the interest of good relations with our neighbors.  This notion was apparently radical and unsettling to our neighbor who preferred that we stand up and fight, but in the end none of it proved necessary.  We watched our position carefully as the tide shifted and it became quite clear to everyone that there was plenty of room on all sides.  Someone gave the conch horn a mighty blow at sunset (as you do) and we all settled down to sleep prepared for various degrees of early starts in the morning.

Dragonfly has escaped the clutches of the Galliot Cut and is heading out to the open ocean.

     By the time Lisa and I finished our coffee, had a little breakfast and made our plan for raising the main sail and getting the boat ready, most of the other boats had already taken off.  We left while the tide was still coming in, but it was getting close to high.  We saw probably only 1.5 to 2 knots of current in the cut.  Dragonfly normally motors around 6 knots and can go 7 or 8 if we wanted to really rev up the old diesels.  We just plowed through at our usual rpms and slowed to 4.5 knots for a few minutes.  Soon enough, we were able to turn to starboard and started to catch the wind in our big old main sail.  As soon we pushed out of the current of the cut and filled up the main and we jumped from 4.5 to 7 knots in an instant.  Lisa and I unfurled the genoa (the big sail up front) and I throttled the engines down to idle and Dragonfly was skipping along happily at 6.5 knots.  I killed those noisy old motors and we savored the relative silence of a sailboat puffing along in the breeze.  When we came out of the cut, there were 4 boats in a pack coming up very fast that seemed certain to overtake us.  However, once I turned the nose south, we seemed to be actually pulling away from them.  Lisa and I stretched our inelastic brains to remember what little we learned about how to best trim the sails and were soon eeking out another knot or so of speed.  We were running about 7.5 knots, sometimes puffing up over 8.  The wind was actually a bit forward of where we'd see ideal performance, but we were extremely happy to be squeezing 7-8 knots out of what was typically 15 or so knots of wind at maybe 60 degrees.  Our speed fluctuated as the wind ebbed and surged, but we steadily opened a gap on the boats chasing us.  Soon they were a half mile back, then a mile, then a mile and half.  I cranked up the satellite radio (to Yacht Rock, of course) and we bounded along happily.  It was a pretty busy day on the water and we dodged a number of boats coming the other way or popping out of the inside, so I had to keep a sharp eye out.  At one point, I noticed that a boat going exactly the same way as us was up ahead about 3 miles.  As the day went along, we drew ever closer until finally I ran him down and pulled in front!  As accomplishments go, it probably wasn't all that much, but I was very happy about it.  We ended up arriving in Georgetown earlier than expected and were safely on the hook by 2pm or so.

Every race has to have a winner and a loser and this guy got to be the loser today.