Our first stop in the Exumas was a lovely beach on Norman’s Cay. Having tested out our outboard with the new fitting before leaving Nassau, we headed toward the beach with confidence….and then the motor died half way to shore. Not to be deterred from making it to the beach for Kata to get a run around, Kevin deployed the oars and started rowing. A couple of minutes later a dinghy headed our way from one of the nearby boats and asked “Exercise or engine troubles?!”. Yet again we were getting a tow to our destination by a very kind boater. It was becoming a comedy of errors at this point!
When they say it’s a small world, the cruising world is much smaller! When we landed at the beach, we discovered that a friend we had made in Freeport was in one of the 2 or 3 small groups of people on the beach! This was several days worth of sailing to get to this particular beach in this particular small Cay in the Exumas, so it’s not like we had just gone around the corner! After a lovely time at the beach we went back to Avion and I got to work on pulling out the Carburetor to give it a good clean out. Carburetor reinstalled and dinghy back in the water, and it seemed as though this fix had done it! Yippee!!
Now, unfortunately we needed to leave our anchorage to find a more sheltered one as a bit of a blow was coming. Hopefully we will get back there one day to see Pablo Escobar’s sunken plane that was around the corner. At least we finally had a working dinghy!
One part of the Exumas that we were told repeatedly that we needed to go to was Shroud Cay. Shroud Cay is a small island with a naturally occurring lazy river (known as the washing machine) and beautiful mangrove forests at its heart. It has many beautiful beaches and is home to plentiful marine life. A strict no wake zone exists throughout the inner waterways so the idea is to idle through and let the water take you until you pop out at a beautiful beach on the Exuma Sound side of the island. This island was an absolute highlight of our trip and I would highly recommend it to anybody heading to the Bahamas.
After a couple of exploration trips around the island it was time to hunker down for the blow. This lasted a couple of nights and we were reading 35kt gusts at one point. It got fairly choppy at the anchorage but nothing too terrible, mostly annoying because we didn’t feel comfortable going out on dinghy trips. Poor Kata was very bored! Sometimes these sorts of days are good to let us get stuff done around the boat and do some planning for the next sail.
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