Wardrick Wells, March 10-11, 2022
Unfortunately, we had to consider our trip to Wardrick Wells more of a scouting mission than an actual stop. We were extremely eager to spend time here in what many consider to be the jewel of the Exuma Land and Sea Park, a nature reserve spanning 176 square miles and consisting of innumerable islands, mostly unspoiled and off limits to development. The history of the Bahamas suggests that protecting land from development has not often been a success, so we are big advocates of supporting the sea park. We made a donation that qualifies us as "support fleet" and offers a few advantages like the ability to reserve a mooring ball in advance. Normally, you have to participate in a radio lottery first thing in the morning and we find that the spaces tend to vanish before the requests have even slowed down when they open the process at 9am. The mooring field is absolutely stunning!
You must stay in the water that is the deeper blue or you will run aground fast
Our trip to reach Wardrick Wells was smooth and uneventful. The most excitement we had is when we wandered past two massive megayachts. AIS says they are called Intrepid & Infinity and they are owned by Eric Smidt, the Chairman & CEO of Harbor Freight. It is somewhat confusing because there is a similar superyacht also named Infinity that is owned by Eric Schmidt, the ex-CEO of Google. In any event, the secondary boat is needed to carry around all the helicopters, submarines and speedboats that you need to really enjoy your time in the Bahamas. Although, I've given my fair share of cash to Harbor Freight, my invitation was somehow lost in the mail.
We only once ventured into shallow water and were luckily able to get back to the deep stuff without running aground or any other drama, although we were close enough to the bottom to churn up a little sand with the propeller. Our practice thus far has been to have me drive the boat and for Lisa to dangle over the front and haul up the mooring ball to run a dock line through the eye. These particular mooring balls are extremely heavy duty and are very, very heavy. So heavy in fact, that Lisa found the boat hook tugged from her hands and floating its way lazily down the channel. We acted fast and got some 12 year olds on paddleboards to help us, and soon enough recovered the boat hook for our second attempt. Lisa declared that it was too heavy for her to operate and we switched positions, with her steering and me doing the lifting. I got one attempt in, but we weren't quite able to stay in place and I ended up dropping the ball as the boat drifted away. I'm not as good at telling Lisa what to do as she is at telling me what to do. This is probably due to a lifetime of practice. Fortunately, a couple of other sailors were passing by on their dinghy and sized up our likelihood of success on our third try and offered to take a line from me and run it through while on the dinghy. Honestly, it didn't go all that great for them either -- the tackle is extraordinarily heavy here, but we did eventually manage get it done. At one point I called for Lisa to give the boat a little forward and we were pressed up against the dinghy and I had a horrible vision of being in a news story, but nothing of the sort happened.
I guess after seeing how we handled the mooring ball,
they thought we might need someone to tell us where we were.
We went to the office to check in and found a convivial group of 8 or so cruisers who were all waiting for the office to open. The official hours were from 1-5, but it was about 3 and they said it hadn't opened yet. Someone came by and told us that the lady who ran the office was returning from a trip and should arrive "soon" from Nassau. We swapped stories and talked about our plans for the upcoming storm. Most were opting to ride it out in the park, but we had taxes to file and needed to get to the land of internet so we couldn't stay. The lady did eventually arrive, but there was some kind of problem with the keys. Someone had them, but he wasn't here and she wasn't at all confident he would arrive. So we all piled back in our dinghys and retired to our boats for dinner and sundowners.
The park office where I spent most of my time at Wardrick Wells.
We decided to treat ourselves to one of our better meals in the larder and seared up some steaks and made a mushroom couscous for dinner. Due to spending so long at the park office for what we thought would be a 10 minute thing, I no longer had time to do a sous vide and had to cook it in a skillet like a savage. I was confident that our plan to drink our last bottle of Papapietro Perry pinot noir would overcome any mistakes in the cooking process. Our electric induction stovetop can be a bit fussy. It doesn't like you to use both burners on high heat and even one high and one medium can trigger a fit where it simply stops working. I thought I had mastered the process. However, just at the crucial moment when I took the couscous off the burner and was preparing to finish the thick filets in the oven, the electricity went out. I went over to the electrical panel and all of the 220v circuits on the entire boat were refusing to activate. They have cheerful green lights when they work and all of them were now showing bright angry red. Most of the actual boat stuff runs on the 12v system, which was working fine, but almost all of the cooking stuff works on the 220v system. I thought perhaps the inverter had goofed up, although the control panel didn't report any errors. I tried starting the generator and flipped power over to it and still no love on the 200v panel. This was starting to lead to stress. First of all, this didn't bode well for finishing dinner. Secondly, electricity is very handy and I'd really prefer to keep it. This led to a madcap chase through the boat, opening every panel I knew of that had electrical panels on them. One by one, each panel was ruled out. Most of them were controlling individual circuits, when this was clearly a more systemic issue. All of them were carefully labelled. In French. There is very little overlap between things you can find on a menu (I know ALL of those) and things that appear on labels on electrical circuits (I know NONE of these). Lisa could translate some of it and would say stuff like "that word means hot, so probably the water heater." Owner's manuals were tossed around the cabin, with their obscure labels in French also providing very little insight.
#4 I know means microwave.
Disjoncter has a button, but no amount of disjoncting improved the situation
I eventually remembered that there were some weird panels with very fat electrical cables down in the engine compartment where I replaced the autopilot. This is also the engine compartment with the generator and where one would connect to shore power, if I was the sort of person who did that kind of thing. I opened the scary panel with a special lock that you have to use to open it which suggests that it has high voltage or a high likelihood of doing something stupid. Everything looked normal enough there and it didn't seem like the right sort of thing. I performed the necessary contortions to squeeze my wide body into the other side of the engine bay where there were a few more panels. The biggest ones, where I hoped to find a comically large red switch I could throw seemed fine. However there was a small panel with two little circuit breakers which were in opposite positions. Eureka, thought I. The one that appeared to be off had more incomprehensible labels, the only word of which I recognized was "minor." I flipped it back on and slowly unfolded myself transformer style until I emerged from the engine bay of doom. I walked up to the 220v panel, pressed the magic buttons and viola, bright lights of vert (that one I know because green beans on are the menu)! Celebration ensued. It wasn't quite the hug anyone you see kind of joy the autopilot was, but it was good.
The beach where I incorrectly thought I was going to learn to paddleboard.
Lisa felt bad for me and went around boat restoring things to their proper place that I had thrown willy nilly as I crashed from one side to another looking for switches. I finished dinner and only slightly ruined the filet mignon by overcooking it a bit. We were so relieved that we didn't even care. The wine was delicious and hadn't gone bad in the tropical heat and we were very happy campers that night. The next day, we needed to leave quite early because our next anchorage was going to be the tightest squeeze we've ever attempted where we expected to find lots of 6 foot and maybe even 5 foot depths. We really needed to be there at high tide, especially since my depth gauge was still refusing to indicate depths below 10 feet. We went back to the office to pay for our night and of course it took forever because island time. We hoped to get in a walk to the top of the "big" hill where rumor had it that cell phone reception was great. The trail turned out to be not very clear and our shoes were more suited to jumping out of the dinghy into the water than "serious" hiking, so we abandoned it and moved it. We are very determined to return here and give it the time it deserves.
Not really a Crocs and water shoes kind of trail.
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