This was an unusually full day, but there is no such thing as a “usual” day for us. After a day this busy we often spend the following day doing quiet activities like reading and blogging, because a full day in the sun is very exhausting!

7AM

I had done all the research for this trip yesterday, so I knew that we had to leave at 7am to hit Current Cut on a favorable tide. There’s nothing difficult about the cut (it’s not shallow or narrow), but the current rips through there, sometimes reaching a peak of 9 knots! We only motor at 5 knots, so it’s important to time our passage correctly.

The nearest tide marker is in Nassau, and the guides say that slack current occurs 45 minutes to 1.5 hours after slack at Nassau. Based on my math, we’d arrive at the cut about an hour after high tide at Nassau, so we’d have a small amount of favorable current to carry us through.

We had the benefit of watching the AIS of a boat ahead of us, so we saw that they gained 4 kts of speed as they went through the cut. We were 20 minutes behind them and we got a 3.5 kt boost! The cut itself wasn’t very scenic, but it was wild to see the eddies and foam created by the current, since we haven’t had any tidal current since Florida!

Kyle put out all the fishing lines, but our lures are probably too big for the shallow water fishes on the banks. We could see clear to the bottom and there was nothing but sand, so no good hiding places for fishes either.

There is absolutely no wind today, so we’re motoring to our next anchorage near the Glass Window Bridge in Eleuthera. After days and days of strong wind, it’s mind-blowing to see mirror-smooth water like this.

9:30AM

En route, I started up the watermaker. This is a near-daily chore, and the benefit of having the engines running is that the alternators are putting power into the batteries so I’m not drawing down our house bank while making water. We dropped anchor at 10:45am, which is really nice because it feels like we still have the whole day to go do stuff! About an hour after we dropped anchor, the water tanks were full, so I turned the watermaker off.

12PM

This is embarrassing but funny so I’ll share it anyway. I still had all my birthday flash tattoos on so we staged a small photoshoot for some instagram pics. We have to do it now before I put sunscreen on, because flash tattoos and sunscreen don’t mix. This set of photos is really hilarious because that winch is electric and I think this might be the first time we’ve ever put a winch handle in it and pretended to manually winch things. So ridiculous. We don’t often stage photos…but sometimes we do.

After that Kyle made us some lunch, we’ve just been grocery shopping so we have fresh greens for salads and we also tried a local specialty, Johnny Cakes. We weren’t sure what to expect, but these were flat discs of bread that tasted similar to Hawaiian rolls. While he made lunch, I got ready, which involves three different types of sunscreens, plus packing a backpack with UPF clothing (just in case!) and some backup sunscreen. We also grabbed water bottles, the good camera, the underwater camera, and the drone. The backpack was very full.

1PM

We took the dinghy in to the beach, pulled it up into the sand and set the anchor up on shore. It’s really hard to tell what part of the tide cycle we’re in right now, I think it’s nearly full tide. You never want to beach the dinghy at low tide and have it float away as the water comes up.

Across the street was our first stop, the Queen’s Bath. The island is incredibly narrow here, it’s just a few minute’s walk to the ocean side where the waves rage against the rocky marl. As we walked out towards the rocks, we nearly stepped on a pile of hermit crabs! All sizes, shells of all shapes and colors – nearly every shell in this photo has a hermit crab in it!

Since we live on a boat, we’re familiar with the incredible force of water, but it’s always good to be reminded of how powerful the ocean can be.

We made it over to the baths and sat there, mesmerized, for quite a while. We decided to come back tomorrow with a picnic lunch and just watch the waves.

We wandered down the road towards the Glass Window Bridge. The road was narrow, windy, and didn’t have a shoulder. Cars came flying by and we did our best to stay out of their way. As we neared the bridge we started hearing something strange.

It was a blowhole! There must be a path through the marl that’s harnessed all the power of the waves, first a salty spray would shoot out of the blowhole, followed by a burst of water 30 ft in the air!

We both wanted to look down the hole, but the spray is like a fire hose. I put my hand over it and that was a big mistake! The camera battery died here, I didn’t even think about bringing a spare battery, so we switched to the cell phone for photos.

Then we crossed the bridge. The Glass Window was originally a natural rock bridge, sailors would be in the rough ocean swell and look through the “window” to see the calm, teal water on the other side of Eleuthera but they’d have no way to get there! The bridge is now manmade and occasionally must be closed when the seas are so rough they crash over the bridge! The rocks under the bridge prevent water from freely flowing, but the swell created a waterfall into the harbor. I debated flying the drone, since I’m still not stoked about flying it over water and there wasn’t really a good launch site, but it’s really difficult to get a good photo of the bridge from the ground.

I made my drone flight pretty short because there were other people there, and I don’t want to ruin their experience or make them feel uncomfortable. Hopefully we’ll go back some quiet morning and I can get better shots.

We packed up our stuff and headed back to the boat. It was a pretty decent hike, maybe a mile along the road each way, plus clambering around the marl at the baths and poking around at the bridge.

3PM

I was ready to curl up and chill for a bit, but Kyle has been getting amped up about spearfishing. He wanted to try out our sling spear, so he tied a beer can to an anchor and dove in to practice. The water is a little cloudy here but you can still see his anchor.

Needless to say, this beer can is very dead. Unfortunately, fish are slightly faster than a beer can!

5PM

We were anchored next to our friends on s/v Consort, they weren’t home when we anchored but they stopped by later to invite us to join them at the Glass Window Bar and Grill. They had a friend visiting, he was supposed to fly out today but his flight was canceled so they’re in limbo, waiting to put him on a plane. We joined them at the bar for some Kaliks (the local beer) and exchanged stories. They told us that the Glass Window was even more wild yesterday – the swell is slowly dying down in this calm weather. They also told us about a truck that had been parked at the bridge and got washed away in a big wave (not recently, it’s been there a while), we hadn’t seen that yet but I ended up taking the paddle board over there the next day so I can show you a photo of the truck!

By 6pm, every boat in the anchorage had dinghied over to the restaurant for food and drinks, so we met a few more sailors! However, food can be pricey here, so we opted to head back home for dinner. Before we left we invited everyone to join us for our picnic lunch tomorrow!

7PM

After we ate dinner, we did what we do most nights. Watch an episode of TV, play with our tablets, maybe check the weather and at least make a rough plan for what we’re going to do for the next couple days. The weather is still calm so we’ll be in this anchorage for another night or two. Kyle keeps saying “NOW it feels like we’re back in the Bahamas,” and today really did feel like the first day we’ve done some major exploring, we’ve seen some iconic Bahamian landmarks, and today was the first day he’s played in the water. It was a fun, huge, exhausting day!

We went to bed around 10pm, between tiredness and the calm anchorage we slept like rocks.