Bahamas Journey - Update 2/20/24
We last sent an email on Jan 27, near the beginning of our trip when we were in Bimini. We spent several days in Bimini while waiting for good weather to cross to the Berry Islands. We connected with friends (Tom & Jess) of ours that we met last fall at Cruiser’s University in Annapolis, and on Feb 1, we left Bimini and sailed across the Bahama Bank with our friends to get to the southern end of the Berry Islands. After anchoring one night on the Bank, we made it to Frazer’s Hog Cay, an awesome anchorage with a cool beach with a ton of sea life (live conch, fish, rays, etc.). We loved the area but could only stay there one night because we needed to find somewhere to wait out some upcoming weather that was further south to make progress toward our goal of getting to a marina in George Town, where we were planning to leave our boat to come back to Colorado.
We parted ways with our friends who needed to get to New Providence/Nassau to pick up some family, and we set sail for the Fresh Creek area of Andros. Andros is the largest island in the Bahamas and is less touristy than most areas in the Bahamas - we only saw a handful of boats/tourists in the five days we spent there. The locals were awesome, and we really liked our anchorage. The storm rotated around quite a bit, and it seemed like over the course of the three-day blow, the winds came from every direction, but we were super happy with where we anchored and with how well our ground tackle (anchor, chain, etc,) did in the storm.
Once the weather cleared, we were ready to make our way to the Exumas, and we departed Andros at 8PM on February 8 to start our first official overnight sail. We ended up sailing 16-17 hours all the way to Sampson Cay in the middle of the Exuma islands, where we anchored around 2PM on February 9. Again, we loved Sampson, and I think we’ll be back there later. I'm so glad we connected with another CruisersU couple, Carole & Hugh, who were staying in the same anchorage - we did happy hour on their boat, and they gave us a ton of advice we’ll use this season.
We left on February 10 from Sampson Cay and went down to Black Cay. This was another gorgeous anchorage and not at all crowded (only one other boat). We took a short hike on shore, explored an abandoned building site, and scouted out a great spot for future beach bonfires.
On Sunday, February 11, we arrived in George Town. We got into the marina at Exuma Yacht Club around noon. After a bit of a harrowing docking experience (huge winds and less than experienced dock crew), we were docked (although without the promised shore power). On Monday, we moved to a better, more protected slip where they thought they could get us power. George Town definitely has more boats/cruisers than we’ve ever seen in one place before, and it was fun to see the anchor lights of 300+ boats in the harbor at night.
We flew home Tuesday morning (left at 8AM, stopped in Nassau and FLL, and arrived back in Denver at 6:15PM). Unfortunately, we didn’t end up getting shore power at the marina before we left, and they weren’t able to get it connected all week. However, the dockmaster has been awesome and runs our generator for us every few days. We can monitor our power generation from solar and our power consumption remotely, so we let him know when we need him to run the generator, and we seem all set.
While we had tons of fun with family this weekend, we're really looking forward to getting back to Second Half. The first few weeks of sailing were kind of a push to get to George Town, and we sailed against seas and winds more than we would have liked. We plan to spend the rest of February and all of March in the Exumas. After that, we think we’ll spend a few weeks in Eleuthera, and then we’ll finish up with a month or so in the Abacos before we cross back to the East Coast in mid-late May. We have some family visiting us in the Bahamas over the course of the next few months, but besides making sure we’re in places where we can meet up with them, our trip planning should be more mellow, and we should be able to wait out seas, winds, and weather and have more favorable sailing going forward.
