Shroud Cay, March 8-10, 2022

     So, if you have been reading these posts and saying we are in Shroud Key like the thing that opens a lock, award yourself 5 imaginary internet points.  If you have been saying Shroud Kay, like the letter K you must receive a demerit in your permanent file.  I don't make the rules, this is just the way it is.  I've tried to figure out why it is spelled Key in the US like Key West and Cay in the Bahamas.  I'm pretty sure it can be blamed on the Brits, like maths and bonnet and the like.

 All the cool billionaires now have a bonus boat for carrying around their toys. 

     You may remember I introduced you to the idea of "lazy sailing" where one doesn't bother to put up the main sail because its a pain in the neck and might not be worth the time.  Well, this trip took lazy sailing to new heights because it was about 20 minutes out of 1 anchorage, 20 minutes into the next and 20 minutes of actual travel.  Therefore, I couldn't be bothered to raise either sail and just motored on in.

     Shroud Cay is the northernmost tip of an awesome place called the Exuma Land and Sea Park.  Its a nature preserve where no one is permitted to fish, collect shells, hunt lobster or build anything.  They are trying to preserve a hunk of the beautiful Exumas in their pure natural state and I'm a huge fan of the project.  Lisa and I donated some money to be some kind of members, which gives us priority access to the mooring balls that are in very high demand at certain islands and helps support their mission of preservation and conservation.

Many sailors love Shroud Cay, most of us are sipping adult beverages and watching the sun set.

     Shortly after we nestled onto our mooring ball, we had one of those brief moments of heart-racing panic.  First, Lisa reported that the water pump wasn't making pressure to the sink.  When I went to the control panel to make sure that the pump was switched on, I saw the light that indicated that the bilge pump in the engine bay was on and pumping water.  I suppose everyone knows that one of the worst things to happen on a boat is for it to be filling up with water.  It is very high on my list of things to avoid.  As I scrambled to the engine bay to investigate, my mind raced with possibilities.  That is also where the water pump is located, so my first worry was that the water level had gone high enough to short circuit the water pump.  The water pump is up on a shelf, so that would be very bad indeed.  

     I popped open the hatch and more or less jumped down without bothering to use the ladder.  The source of the problem was immediately apparent: a hose had come lose from a manifold directly off of the water pump and the water pump was valiantly pumping out fresh water from my water tank as fast as it possibly could, which was gushing out of the open hose and into the bilge.  Fortunately, the bilge pump is quite beefy and it was happily pumping the fresh water overboard to refill the Great Bahama Bank with tasty reverse osmosis fresh water.  No water was building up in the bilge and its much better to leak fresh water into the bilge than salt water from the outside.  I shouted for Lisa to turn the pump off, which she did immediately and in seconds the bilge pump ground to a halt as it dutifully kept the engine bay dry.  

 This boat stole our color scheme.  I don't know if I should be mad or congratulate them on their taste.

      I took a few minutes to urge my heart back to a normal rate, climbed out and grabbed a few tools.  A minute or two later, I had the hose secured to its proper place and gave the hose clamps a few extra twists to ensure they wouldn't vibrate loose again.  I turned the freshwater pump back on and everything was restored to the proper working order.  Miraculously, we must have caught it right away, because we couldn't even tell that the level of water in the tank was even down from full.    

  Nobody took pictures of the flooding engine bay, so here are some more boats chilling at Shroud.

    We were hoping to get in some dinghy operations, but my run of bad luck / incompetence wasn't quite done yet.   As we were lowering the dinghy, I was protecting my sore finger by only using my first few fingers to grip the line.  It turns out that my grip strength wasn't good enough with just 3 fingers and the line started to slip through my hand.  I tried to hold it with just my left hand, but that didn't work and the rope pulled through my palms.  All wise sailors know to wear special gloves to protect against rope burns in situations like these.  I am not a wise sailor.  So instead of exploring in the dinghy, I soaked my blistered palms in cold water for a few hours and pouted a little.  Just as I was feeling better, I went to make myself a bottle of ice cold lemonade and managed to turn that into a disaster.  Our boat freezer is a bit erratic, so our ice tends to turn into modern art, all fused together at janky angles.  My habit is to take something a bit heavy and smash it into the ice and then use the resulting shards for my drink.  I have a lovely Yeti tumbler that is built very ruggedly that I often use for this purpose.  I picked it up and gave the bag of ice a satisfying thump.  Unfortunately, it still held the remnants of my morning coffee, set aside when I burned my palms.  Coffee lofted into the air in a graceful curve, landing all over me, my white shirt and the bag of ice.  I felt so defeated, I didn't even curse.  I just took off my clothes and resigned myself to the prospect of never leaving the boat for the rest of the day.    

     We made ourselves a nice dinner, drank a drink or two and watched the sun set.  Lisa took advantage of the hot water courtesy of our 1 hour engine time to take a nice long hot shower.  Unfortunately, it was a bit too long and when she was done, between the leak and the shower, our water supplies were dwindling.  Back down to the engine bay for me, to run the water maker and top the tanks off again.   This was not our best day.

Tired of sunset pictures yet?  Too bad, I'm not.

     The next day, however, was absolutely fantastic.  It turned out that either I'm a big baby and my rope burn was extremely minor or soaking my hands in cold water was a huge help.  Either way, you can't even hardly find the blisters and my pinky is healing nicely as well.  Lisa dug out some crazy first aid supplies and has taken to wrapping my finger like an ER resident with a wad of gauze and stretchy fabric tape.  We took a winding dinghy ride through the meandering creeks that cross Shroud Cay.  Eventually we came out on the Atlantic ocean side to a spectacular beach.  We were not as well prepared as some people.  Many folks had tents and blankets and coolers and one pair of dudes even had some kind of jet-powered underwater thing that powered them up and down the beach.  I think they are called ScubaJets and I was more excited to buy it before I looked up the price online.  Even though we were woefully unprepared, we had a great time walking around the beach and exploring everything.

The winding creek that passes through the island

    There was a trail that led up the hill and taking trails up hills is pretty much our thing, so we had to do it.  Normally, we prefer to hike to a fort, but you have to make do with what you find.  At the top was a sign proclaiming it to be "Camp Driftwood" along with some grumpy notices asking cruisers to stop dumping weird random stuff that they have to haul away.  Camp Driftwood was the site of the DEA's observation station where they watched the drug smuggling activity at Norman's Cay.  We didn't see any smuggling activity.

You turn a corner and BAM, there is the Atlantic with its much deeper blue.

     It was one of the most fun days we have had while cruising and I'd love to spend more time here and wander about in a more leisurely fashion.  We have an artificial deadline with a storm on the way for Saturday and Lisa's business taxes due early next week, so we have to get south of the park and access to good internet by the time the storm rolls in.  It was even more depressing to leave behind our next destination after only one day.  I'm quite sure we'll be back, probably in just a month or two.

 Quite possibly the most beautiful spot in the Bahamas.

     When we returned, we needed to shower again and we made the discovery that while we were showering, the bilge pump on that side was coming on.  Lisa was hoping that the shower was leaking so that the fact that we ran out of water could not be blamed on her.  Unfortunately for her, it turns out that the problem is the shower drain pump.  This pump is supposed to take water from the shower and pump it overboard.  However, its current function appears to be to pump about half the water overboard and to spew the other half out of the top of the pump into the bilge.  *Sigh*

 Looking back at the creek we took to the beach from Camp Driftwood.

     I did make a fortuitous discovery however.  Somehow when I conducted my exhaustive inventory of the boat, I missed that there was a compartment under the floor in our master head.  When I opened it up, I found that there is another collection of useful spare parts.  One of them is that there are 2 toilet pumps, which are fairly infamous for going bad (and being a singularly unpleasant job to repair).  There are also a number of other useful spares, including at least 3 other pumps, at least one of which should work perfectly well as a shower pump.  That is a rainy day project for my to-do list.

 

Lisa says my posts are better when I use more pictures, so here's an irrelevant sand dollar.

    Hopefully, I will manage to stop flooding the boat.  Its quite annoying, although honestly I didn't even stress for a minute about the second one.  When the bilge pump only comes on during a shower, its pretty obvious what the problem is and doesn't even get your heart racing.  Plus we have 4 shower pumps on the boat including one that is in a shower that is currently being used to store air conditioning parts.  I'm pretty sure I can find a solution somewhere.

I found out later that it is forbidden to feed baby sharks in the park.
So for legal reasons, this video was shot somewhere else.
I won't do it again, since it might also encourage sharks to bite my toes.
(But it was kinda cool)