We’ve made it to nearly every island we hoped to visit in the Bahamas, and we can see the writing on the wall. It’s time to get out of here. The lockdown restrictions are getting tighter and tighter and we’re almost out of supplies. It’s time to truly start watching for a weather window for the Gulf Stream.

3.29 – Sunday

We had a fairly long passage today, so we decided to get up at 5am and leave Shroud Cay. By 5am we were underway. This area is shallow and full of coral heads, so even though I had our previous route in the nav software and everything is well charted, it was still a pretty nerve-wracking trip through the shallows. As soon as the sunrise gave us enough light, we raised the sails and turned off the engines.

It was a fairly uneventful trip across the banks, our wind got lighter and lighter. We briefly tried wing-on-wing sailing (a downwind technique where one sail is pulled towards the port side and the other is pulled to starboard), but that was the end of our wind and we turned on an engine. We hardly saw any boat traffic and the radio was nearly silent, even as we approached Nassau.

One interesting thing that happened is we saw a local fishing boat that we’ve run into before. Our first week in the Bahamas, we anchored outside of Great Harbour and this fishing boat anchored weirdly close to us with a handful of tiny fishing boats. Early in the morning I took a photo of them in the calm anchorage, soon after that we watched a couple egg cartons float by as they finished up breakfast.

Well, here they are again, during our last week in the Bahamas! Only this time it looks like a mama duck being followed by all her ducklings. Isn’t nature amazing?

We dropped anchor in West End (the opposite side of the island from Nassau) with about 7 other boats. We have been pushing hard, either sailing or exploring every day since the 23rd and we are totally exhausted. I don’t think Kyle is quite as bad as I am, I think I could sleep for about 24 hours straight right now.

3.30 – Monday

The wind was too light to keep moving today, so we stayed aboard. I got finances done, then I got two blog posts out. I edited a ton of video footage, or at least I tried to. I’ll need to do some research to figure out how to correct color in underwater videos. So while it was a quiet day, it was not really a break. It was good to rest my body though. Part of my exhaustion is that every part of me is sore. Sailing days feel like they ought to be relaxing, but they aren’t! My butt is especially sore from the helm seat.

3.31 – Tuesday

We don’t want to linger near Nassau, since we expect it to be heavily patrolled by the Bahamian Defense Force, plus we definitely can’t go ashore here. We don’t expect any trouble from the Defense Force, but enforcement of the emergency orders has been inconsistent and we don’t want to be given strict instructions that conflict with our current plans.

Also, we have a strong west wind coming, and we’re currently a very bad anchorage for a west wind. There are very few places around here with western protection.

We got underway with daylight today. The light and variable winds had us constantly turning on and then shutting down an engine. Sometimes we’d have enough to sail, then we’d slow down to 2kts for too long, so we’d start up an engine, then the wind would fill in again. And we weren’t the only ones – I think Sao was in the West End anchorage with us and they seemed to be going the same direction as us.

It would have been an unremarkable trip with zero photos, except as we neared shore we caught a mahi! The fishing rod on the far starboard side started spooling out, and I grabbed it. The fish immediately pulled all the way over to port, so I had to try to keep her on the line while Kyle reeled in the other three lines so they wouldn’t get tangled. And then when she was about ten feet from the boat, my reel jammed. I also noticed a big red spot on her side, we aren’t the first ones to try to eat this fish! At that point I was just waiting for a shark to beat us to her. Kyle grabbed the line and pulled it in by hand and we dispatched her. Now we can hold off on provisioning for just a little bit longer!

I drove in to Frazier Hog Cay. The reviews from this area are outdated and not great, but it looks like it will have the best western protection. We had to go a long ways in to find a sandy patch for our anchor, but we found what we needed in 8 ft of water and I backed down on the anchor hard.

Kyle cleaned the fish and dropped the carcass overboard. Normally we’d avoid chumming in an anchorage, a don’t-shit-where-you-sleep tactic (ie don’t feed the sharks in a place you might swim). However, this is a remote anchorage that I suspect very few cruisers use. Naturally, after he did that, two more boats joined us.

We watched a couple small reef sharks circle the boat for a while, not getting too close to the carcass but never getting very far away from it. Eventually, one of them went for it. Kyle got part of it on video, the part where the shark is violently shaking his prey (even though at that point the mahi was very, very dead). It was pretty cool! Later a nurse shark came over as well.

We opened our last bottle of wine tonight and watched a movie. We’ve been strictly rationing the wine, but since we should be able to buy some soon it’s time to celebrate!

4.1 – Wednesday

Since we’d caught a fish I needed to make more tortillas for fish tacos. I wanted to get that done in the morning, the coolest part of the day, but today started out hot! I mixed up some masa and got the stove going. It’s a long process because I can only make one at a time. As I made tacos, I watched the sky to the west get darker and darker. I asked Kyle if he could pull up the radar, but his cell signal was too weak.

When he got up to look at the sky it was almost on top of us. I couldn’t leave the stove, so he ran around closing hatches and lashing down anything that might move. He cleaned up the cockpit as the wind started howling. Then the downpour started. The hatch above the nav station started leaking, so I grabbed the electronics and moved them to a safe spot.

The wind gusted to the highest we’ve seen yet in the Bahamas, just over 40 kts. The anchorage was completely flat and we didn’t move an inch. I’m so happy this anchorage worked out! I finished up the tortillas as the last gusts of the storm passed by. Naturally, the storm cooled everything off and the rest of the day was much cooler than the morning I spent standing over a hot stove. It’s been so long since it rained, I’m stoke to have a clean boat again!

Unrelated to any of this, I think people get the impression that the Bahamas is all sandy beaches. The majority of the coast is this porous rocky marl, it’s very sharp and uninviting.

By afternoon the weather was downright enjoyable. Kyle and I each grabbed a beer and sat down in the cockpit for our “happy hour.” Halfway through our beers, Sao dinghied over, wondering about our plans. They told us about paddleboarding yesterday, when they went to shore they surprised a stingray and it had pointed it’s stinger up in the air trying to sting! We’ve never seen one do that before.

They also talked about their experience in Georgetown, they’d been there later than us and it sounds like the other cruisers have become almost militant about enforcing the self-isolation, patrolling the beaches for anyone “putting the whole community in jeopardy.” Cruisers are not allowed to go to the beaches there, which is a little ridiculous as it’s very easy to keep to yourselves on the beaches there and I think it’s important for mental health to go for a hike. That being said, I’ve heard that local authorities have threatened to kick out any boat that won’t adhere to the rules, and I understand that if too many boaters disobey then the whole community may have to pay the price. There’s a good reason we left the Georgetown hivemind.

I witnessed the Georgetown hostility on Facebook, a cruiser posted a query about where to get water, citing their status as a new arrival. People were up in arms, “Where are you coming from?” “You shouldn’t be moving right now!” Uh, last time I checked, drinking water qualified as an essential supply, and there are very few places to get water in the remote southern islands. Not to mention the fact that it’s extremely easy to social distance on a boat, and drinking water can be acquired in GT without interacting with any person since it’s available at a spigot on the dinghy dock.

It was really nice to talk to Sao, they seemed like lovely people, we of course apologized for not inviting them aboard, but they wouldn’t have said yes anyway, they stayed in their dinghy and we chatted from a distance. That’s how things are now.

I had a little cabin fever before dinner, and this may be our last chance to go for a walk, so we went ashore. This is a private island, I believe, and we did pass some houses on the way in but many are boarded up and there’s no life around this northern area where we’re anchored.

We got to the beach and discovered an abandoned road. There are some ruins on a hill along the shore, so we decided to follow the road and see if we can get to the ruins.

We followed the trail for a ways and when it forked we took the option that headed towards the ruins, but the vegetation is so dense that we can’t get to the building we can see from the boat. Kyle briefly explored an abandoned outbuilding, until he realized it was the well house and there was no solid ground underneath it!

We started walking back and almost stepped on a snake crossing the trail. It looked harmless, not venomous, but we let it slither off into the grass before continuing on.

We tried the other fork to see if it led to anything, but we only found a truck graveyard.

We really question things like this, on an island this remote it’s got to be extremely difficult and costly to get a vehicle to the island. And I understand that the money isn’t always there when things break down, but surely the vehicle is valuable enough that someone would make the effort to fix it? Yet here we have the corpses of a few abandoned trucks.

We returned to the dinghy, grateful to have stretched our legs. We don’t know when we’ll be able to go ashore again! From here we’ll have an overnight to Bimini, then we’ll anchor for less than 24 hours before making our way across the Gulf Stream.