When we last left you, we had just arrived in Georgetown. Pretty much every cruiser in the Bahamas makes the sojourn to Georgetown at some point, it’s the cruising mecca and gathering spot for boaters. It’s also the jump off point to cruising the rest of the Caribbean. It’s regatta week, so the anchorage is packed with about 350 boats. What’s makes this place so special? We’re going to try to find out!

3.1 – Sunday

Right off the bat I hated Georgetown. It’s everything I don’t want in an anchorage: it’s deep, it’s far from the places I want to go to, and it’s rolly. We didn’t sleep much for the first few nights here because of the swell. As for the location, we ended up near Sand Dollar Beach, which is close to…Sand Dollar Beach. It’s not terribly far from Chat’n’Chill, the local watering hole, but in this swell it’s a wet dinghy ride. I refuse to dinghy to town from here because it’s way too far and the waves are too big.

We met up with friends at Chat’n’Chill and exchanged stories. Sunday is the pig roast and their website says they often sell out by 2pm so we made sure to arrive just ahead of noon. We had caught a mahi and NFA had caught a wahoo, so we invited everyone back to our boat tonight for a fish tasting!

3.2 – Monday

After getting no sleep, I pored over the map looking for a place we could move to that would be calmer but it’s all pretty exposed here. We were bouncing so much that we couldn’t safely have pulled up anchor anyway (we risk the anchor swinging into the boat, or the chain scraping the hull as we raise/lower the anchor).

3.4 – Wednesday

I haven’t slept in days. I keep waiting for the wind to calm down but now that I’m starting to think of 15 knots as “calm,” I can see I’m in for a bad time.

We headed in to Chat’n’Chill for one of the regatta events, the small boat races. We met a few new people, which was the entire point of coming to Georgetown, so today was a success! Later that day we headed back in for the regatta gala (where my Friends fans at?), all dressed up for the “costume” contest. We ran into people we met at Glass Window and they introduced us to new people, so more new friends!

3.5 – Thursday

I’m truly going mad. Lack of sleep is getting to me. We decided to stop hoping the weather would calm down as predicted, and start taking action. We moved the boat right snug up to Sand Dollar Beach. We’re so close that if the wind clocks around to the west and we swing towards shore, there’s a good chance our rudders will hit the bottom.

We took a hike to the Exuma Sound side of the island today. It was gorgeous. It really is starting to get calm today, you can see by how clear the water is.

Today’s event was hosted by the Alcohol Research Group, it was a dark rum tasting! We went in expecting six different flavors of Ricardo, so you should have seen our faces when we walked up and the host told us the rum was organized by region. The hosts are fellow Michiganders on a boat named Grand Cru, which explains why we found a New Holland rum in the mix! We had heard Grand Cru on the radio asking for crew for the race on Friday, specifically looking for crew with a freshwater hailing port and we strongly considered it, but the day of the race is the one true calm day and we decided to run errands while we can keep the salt water out of our grocery bags.

3.6 – Friday

We had a long discussion this morning about where to ride out the coming weather – multiple days of 25-30 kt winds. Essentially, we don’t know where we’d have good swell protection. We’re probably in a pretty good spot, we won’t have any boats in front of us during the blow so there’s no potential for anyone to drag into us. But I’d identified Monument Beach as the anchorage I wanted to ride out the blow in. The problem is that we’re in a pretty good spot here and we don’t know how busy that anchorage is. It’s likely very full due to the aforementioned weather. We finally decided to go with the devil we know, and stay put. We’ve been discussing this for days, and there’s so much uncertainty. Once we choose a spot we won’t be able to move, so if we choose poorly then we’re stuck with that choice.

We took the dinghy to Georgetown and got groceries (I know, I said I refused to dinghy all the way to town and here we are taking the dinghy to town). I forgot to take a Bonine beforehand, so I was subject to “grocery store fog,” which is Kyle’s name for the land-sickness I tend to get. It’s a mild seasickness, mostly showing as confusion, malaise, and general disorganization. I get in the grocery store with my list, and by the end of the first aisle I no longer really care what we buy because I can’t make my brain focus on anything or make any decisions. It’s really weird, and frankly makes grocery shopping a real challenge. This isn’t like the States where I can make a list and buy exactly what’s on the list, here we tend to make our meal plan based on what’s available and what’s cheap at the grocery store, so all the planning is done on the fly. It’s not easy when I can barely focus.

Since we opted not to move, we now have a problem. The wind is supposed to shift around today, which means at some point it will push us towards shore. Our depth sounder is in the front of the starboard hull, and the rear of the port hull would be the first place to find the sandbar. We hopped in the dinghy and started testing depths. The lowest water we found was 5 ft. Once again we were faced with a decision where we didn’t know right or wrong: should we move to deeper water? We had a long back-and-forth, which no clear answers. We decided to stay put and continue to monitor the situation.

So we’ve been stressing about how shallow the water is right off our stern, and yet this afternoon a catamaran came flying full throttle right next to us towards shore. As they came parallel with us, we could see the panic as they started an emergency pivot when the bottom started coming up to meet them. They turned in time, so it wasn’t an issue. Full throttle towards shore though, that’s a ballsy move. Neither the chart plotter nor my eyeballs would have supported that choice.

This isn’t a city, these are all anchor lights in the Elizabeth Harbour. The calm before the storm.

3.7 – 3.9 (Saturday through Monday)

As forecast, around 2am a band of rain passed through and with that, the high winds started. At the rum tasting party, I sustained a huge number of noseeum bites. I’m allergic (we learned this is Great Harbor Cay!), so I woke up in the wee hours of Saturday morning wanting to scratch the skin off my legs.

I won’t bother to tell you about the next few days, we didn’t get off the boat because the wind was consistently blowing 30 kts and I was miserable with my allergic reaction. No fun was had.

3.10 – Tuesday

After three days aboard, nothing was going to stop us from leaving today. We probably could have gone ashore yesterday, but yesterday was the day with the highest wind and I would have been anxious about our anchor breaking loose with no one aboard. We hiked over to the Sound side again to see what all this wind had kicked up.

It was pretty incredible, especially in contrast to how it looked just a few days ago! If you scroll up you’ll see that both of these photos are framed almost the same as the photos from our hike a few days ago

As we dinghied to the boat, I wasn’t ready to be back yet, so instead I grabbed a couple beers and we buzzed around the anchorage. We beelined and made our way towards Consort, and managed to get Trent up on deck. He invited us aboard for beers. Well we were already drinking beer, but sure we’ll come aboard!

IT WAS SO NICE TO TALK TO OTHER PEOPLE. I might have been a little overexcited in my joy of seeing someone other than Kyle. We hung out in their cockpit and chatted. We talked them into heading to Chat’n’Chill this afternoon, where we met up with NFA as well. It was an amazing evening of talking to real people and not being stuck on my boat.

3.11 – Wednesday

Today is the closing ceremony for the regatta, naturally it’s at Chat’n’Chill, so we arrived mid afternoon for that. We caught up with more friends, and met some new friends. The cruising community here is really great, and it’s been so easy to meet people, which was the whole point in coming to Georgetown!

Grand Cru won the regatta, so now we’re really kicking ourselves for not joining them during the race!

3.12 – Thursday

We made plans for a bonfire potluck tonight, so today I got out the crockpot to see if we could get the slow cooker to work on battery power. It worked out great so we brought a cherry cobbler to the potluck! Cooked by solar power!

There were a bunch of cruisers at the potluck, some new faces too! The bonfire was surprisingly awesome for how little driftwood we found. It was a great night of amazing food and great conversation!

We had all dinghied in at low tide, so we kept checking on the dinghies as the tide came in. Despite our vigilance, three separate rescue missions had to be launched to retrieve errant boats! I think we learned our lesson in Warderick Wells, but it’s so easy to underestimate how quickly the tide comes in and how much beach you lose!

We said goodbye to NFA tonight, they’re heading north tomorrow, making a pretty quick trip back to Florida.

3.13 – Friday

We’re thinking we’ll head out tomorrow, we’ve got a few days of perfect weather so we’re thinking about starting our trek north. That means we’ve got some errands to take care of. We moved the boat over to Georgetown this morning and went ashore to get groceries. The grocery boat hasn’t come in a while due to the high winds we’ve had. They were unpacking the truck when we first arrived, so no groceries yet.

After that, we kept running into people we knew! We couldn’t walk more than a couple buildings without running into friends. What a fantastic problem to have!

Early afternoon we took jerry cans in to the gas station to see if we could get some diesel. On our second jerry can trip we had to wait a while because they were filling the gas station. While we waited we ran into more friends also filling jerry cans! It’s the post-regatta exodus so a lot of people are doing the same thing we are. After the jerry cans were full we checked back with the grocery store and it looked like things were stocked so we got all our groceries. Now the dinghy was fully loaded, 20 gallons of fuel, plus food! We dinghied through the canal towards the boat (the dinghy dock is in Lake Victoria, separated from the big water by a tiny canal) and immediately got soaked. The current and swell were opposing, plus with our load we can’t plane and we took many waves over the side. I tried not to let the groceries get too salty but we were totally soaked even after our short ride.

So now we both needed showers, plus we had to put stuff away and get ready for the fish fry! We were a bit late meeting Trent and Heather but we met them at the dinghy dock and grabbed some beers from the liquor store to wander around with. We made it to Fish Fry Village and enjoyed the breeze and explored the wreck here.

We had a delicious dinner, Kyle finally got to try cracked conch and I got grouper. Trent and Heather talked us into staying one more day because we really want to see the Junkanoo parade that’s closing out the local music and heritage festival tomorrow night!

3.14 – Saturday

We ran into town one more time to see if any more groceries had showed up, they hadn’t, but we took advantage of our proximity and got a couple quarts of ice cream!

We met up with Consort at the dinghy dock and headed in to the festival, got some drinks and then enjoyed ourselves. There was a paintball area set up right next to the kids bouncy castle. The portapotties were being cleaned after each use.

I have been forgetting to talk about coronavirus, but basically, in the states all events are being canceled, school is shut down for at least 3 weeks, and big gatherings are being discouraged. Self-quarantining is a big thing, and cruisers plans keep changing due to closed borders and general uncertainty. So after days and days of reading US news, it seems a little surreal to be attending this big festival in the Bahamas. It’s certainly not huge, and so far there have been no cases of COVID-19 in the Bahamas, but it’s laughable that so many people are home-bound and here we are just going about our daily lives.

The Junkanoo was supposed to start at 10. We waited until 11pm and couldn’t wait any longer – we have to get up with sunrise so we can arrive at our destination at slack tide. We sadly said our goodbyes and headed home. Heather told me later they started the Junkanoo not five minutes after we left. Sounds like our timing!

Alright, so after two weeks in Georgetown we’ve given this place a good try. I still don’t like it. Town grew on me, the first day we were there people didn’t seem friendly but subsequent visits proved that wasn’t true. It’s still everything I don’t like in an anchorage. I view it as a necessary evil: I don’t like being there, but we certainly accomplished our goal of meeting a lot of people! It’s also worth noting that we had crap weather while we were there, which makes any place more difficult to enjoy.