5.21 – Tuesday

After we anchored, we took the dinghy ashore to go snorkeling! I kept my hand firmly attached to my security blanket: an inflatable tube. If I panic and need to get out of the water, it’s the perfect companion. I’m getting much more confident in the water though.

This sailboat wreck is the perfect snorkel location – it’s about ten steps from the beach to the drop-off, and the sailboat wreck is right at the drop-off. We didn’t see too many fish at the wreck this time around.

After the wreck I swam over to where we’d seen a sea star on the way in.

Then we just kept swimming, we found an outboard, Kyle saw a couple glass bottles, I saw a hogfish in the grass right beneath me, and we saw a couple other pieces of detritus as well.

Since Kyle already had his gear out, when we got back to the boat he gave one hull a good scrub before he was exhausted. He said it’s like doing wind sprints, but while holding your breath!

By the time we got back to the boat, three more catamarans had anchored here so now the anchorage is quite full. We’re really hoping to make some boat friends still so we’re hoping there might be a beach gathering later!

I haven’t talked about it too much, but we haven’t made any friends in the Bahamas. We’ve tried to meet up with a couple boats we’ve “met” through Instagram, but it didn’t work out. I haven’t had a real conversation with anyone other than Kyle in about six weeks. Yeah, it’s pretty bad.

5.22 – Wednesday

Kyle scrubbed the other half of the hull this morning, and in the afternoon a couple new boats arrived. We figured they’d head in to the beach to explore, so maybe it would be a good time to hang out on the beach and see if we could make some new friends.

We set up our most enticing beach camp: blanket, umbrella, cold beers, and the slackline. Surely no one could pass us by without asking about what we were doing!

The first dinghy came ashore. No dice. I believe they were not native English speakers, so maybe it was a language barrier issue. Second dinghy: said hi and kept on walking.

What are we doing wrong? I’ve heard that cruisers are so welcoming and it’s easy to make friends, and you’d think that other boaters would be as starved for community as we are. Yet we are struggling to get anyone to say more than “hi.” Completely dejected, we headed back to the boat.

It’s incredibly hot out, so when we got back to the boat we jumped in the water. It felt so good, eventually we grabbed the snorkel gear and the camera and started exploring around the boat. There were a couple dead sea biscuits on the bottom, and a whole handful of little fishes called – I’m not making this up – slippery dicks. I don’t know if this makes it better or worse, but they are clearly juvenile slippery dicks. There are six slippery dicks in this picture, see if you can find them all! I might be pretty juvenile as well…

5.23 – Thursday

We had a four hour sail planned for today, from Powell Cay to Foxtown. We tried something new – raising the main while still at anchor. We didn’t sail off the anchor, but we did shut the engines down as soon as we could.

We turned toward Foxtown and sailed on a beam reach, making about 7-7.5 kt. Then we turned slightly onto a broad reach and dropped down to 5.5 kt. After we turned the waves were aft of us and it was an amazingly comfortable ride. I sat on the pulpit seat for a while just enjoying the sheer perfection of it all – a beautiful sail, perfectly comfortable temps, gentle downhill swell.

We anchored around noon, and this is the first time we’ve really been in a dangerous situation since arriving in the Bahamas.

We had to zig-zag into the harbor to avoid rocks, there are rocks poking out of the water everywhere around here. As I neared my preferred anchoring spot, I saw a repetitive breaking wave, but there were no rocks on either of my charts. Kyle didn’t see what I was talking about, but I was sure there was a rock just under the surface up ahead. The water is light blue where there’s sand and dark blue where there’s weeds, plus we had clouds passing quickly overhead that changed the color of the water as well, so it was really hard to tell visually if anything was amiss.

We dropped anchor, set it, and Kyle was hooking up the bridle when I realized with slow horror that there was a whole line of rocks extending right next to us. They weren’t marked on the Garmin chart or the iNavX (Explorer) chart. I pulled up Navionics, which we don’t use for navigating in the Bahamas because we’ve heard it’s not reliable, and that chart showed the whole line of rocks. It was way too close for comfort at anchor, which means I was extremely close to hitting the rocks as I drove into the anchorage. We pulled up anchor and moved further away. I still feel sick just thinking about it.

I saw the breaking waves on the rock that was far away, but I didn’t see any of the underwater rock that jutted out towards us until after we’d anchored, the sun came out and illuminated the brown area of the water to show the rocks. This is what the underwater rocks look like in the full sun – you can barely see the brownish area on either side of the exposed rock.

For reference, this is how accurate the charts normally are (this is iNavX / explorer charts – the water depth is in meters):

We were anchored pretty far from the town, and the swell was a little too big for the dinghy, so we couldn’t go ashore. That’s a little disappointing because unlike the other towns we’ve stopped at, Foxtown isn’t on the tourist path so it should be more authentic Bahamian life.