5.11 – Saturday

Today we moved an hour south to Tilloo Pond. The area around the pond is all grassy, we tried to anchor once and it wouldn’t set. However, just south of here there’s a big shallow sandbank and the water looks amazingly blue and clear, so we moved a little further south to a beautiful anchorage!

This area is very unprotected which means we’ll we’re just here for one night. We dinghy explored the “mile-long swimming pool,” but it’s just sand, no sea life. Kyle shut down the motor and I tossed the dinghy anchor out, it didn’t set but it slowed our drift in the strong current while we sipped cold beer and enjoyed the scenery. There were a couple rental boats anchored out, even at high tide some areas of the sandbar are only waist deep.

As we were drifting, I thought I heard a man call “Help!” He wasn’t drowning, so the threat didn’t look immediate, and I thought his boat friends heard him. When he yelled a second time, we took action – we motored over and picked him up. He’d been snorkeling and the strong current swept him into deeper water, he couldn’t touch bottom and couldn’t swim against the current. No big deal, we brought him back to his boat. They’d heard him yell but were pretty slow to react. Tourists.

Back at the boat, we geared up to go snorkel in Tilloo Pond. Again, this was not like the reviews said it was. The shoreline was rocky, not friendly at all, and while we did see a couple stingrays and turtles, the water was murky and weedy. We snorkeled a bit just for practice, but we didn’t inspire any curiosity in the nearby sea life so there wasn’t anything to see.

The coolest thing we found was some bright purple finger coral on our way out of the pond – a stark contrast to the surrounding seaweed!

On the way back to the boat we saw a few fish swimming around, I stuck the underwater camera in the water and when I looked at the photos later I was shocked to see that it was a whole school of fish – Kyle gets the win for identifying them as bar jacks because my identification guide shows that black stripe as a shade of yellow.

5.12 – Sunday

We planned on moving south to Little Harbor today, our most southern destination. There are mangrove canals there with blue holes, which Kyle really wants to see.

As we motored south, the incoming ocean swell increased, as there is little protection from the southeast, and we’ve had southeast winds for a couple days. The implications were that our potential anchorages would be fairly uncomfortable, so we decided to turn back north.

I had gone inside to make sure everything was secure when we started getting hit by larger waves, losing my line of sight to the horizon didn’t do me any favors. Kyle was a little annoyed in my lack of response when he was trying to discuss new anchorage options until he realized I was gritting my teeth and trying not to lose my lunch. I haven’t felt seasick in a long time, so this was odd.

We ended up back at Tahiti Beach, mostly because it has decent protection and we just need a place to lay low for a couple days. We’ve been doing multiple excursions a day for the past couple days and now we are completely wiped out. It’s too hot out for the level of activity we’ve been trying to maintain.

5.13 – Monday

We basically took today off, we both really needed a day of rest. All our hiking and swimming has caught up with us. Between the relentless heat and sun, it’s easy to get exhausted and dehydrated.

Last night when we threw out some compost scraps we realized we had some hitchhikers! They might have just been passing through, but in case they weren’t, I got the camera ready tonight when we dropped some food scraps in the water. Sure enough, we seem to have two remoras living on our hull. These are goofy-looking suckerfish, they suction to the hull (or a shark, or a sea turtle) via the flat pad on top of their heads!

They kept making a run at our food scraps, but would occasionally go for the camera too! Logically I know they aren’t going to bite my hand off, but when a fish comes at you with an open mouth, instinct is to pull away! We got a couple fun videos of that, I’ll put them up on Facebook.

5.14 – Tuesday

The wind today is from the southwest, which means Mermaid Reef should be calm. We’re going to head over there and see if we can snorkel! If not, we’ll take refuge at Marsh Harbour for a night, and then tomorrow we’re crossing Whale Cut again. It’s suddenly mid-May and we really should be making our way back to the States.

With the strong wind, we had great sailing weather, so Kyle started getting the main ready to raise. He came back to the helm to discuss strategy with me, and the short version of the story is that out on deck the wind felt significantly stronger, like we should reef the main. We need to sort out our reefing lines before we do that, so basically our options are either full main, or use only the genoa. We took the smart option: genoa only.

Under just the genoa, we were still doing 7 kts. That’s…pretty fast. It’s times like these when I wish we had a working anemometer. Without knowing the windspeed, I have no idea if we’re being reckless or adventurous! 7 knots with just the genoa seems pretty high, we can’t even motor that fast.

Eventually we turned towards Marsh Harbour and had to turn into the wind, so sail down, speed down to 3.5 kt, and…swell? We should have been protected from swell based on the wind direction, but instead we had pretty intense swell from the northwest. Mermaid reef was definitely a no-go. We went straight to Marsh Harbour, which is a very protected anchorage, but we were still seeing quite a bit of swell even in the anchorage – white caps, even! It was perfectly comfortable, just surprising.

One notable thing from today: as we were entering Marsh Harbour we saw dolphins! For all the sea life we’ve seen in the Bahamas, we haven’t seen any dolphins yet, which is really strange because we saw them almost daily in Florida.

Tomorrow we’ll head through Whale cut again and officially be making our way back northward. We need to be north of Florida by June 1st, so we need to start working our way back to the US.