After 8 hours of motoring from Finley Cay to Norman’s Cay, we anchored in the shelter of the cay and prepared to go ashore. We arrived at 3:00PM and had plenty of time to get cleaned up, put the dinghy in the water, and motor ashore. The Beach Club Restaurant/McDuffs was a pleasant 10 minute hike over to the little airport and across to the restaurant. As it turned out, the restaurant no longer had internet—they said that it got knocked out last September when Hurricane Irene blew through. They did have some good food, Bahamian beer, and a big screen TV with the Carolina v Duke game. We were disappointed about not getting internet, but the basketball game was certainly satisfying—Go Heels.
Sleeping in the quiet of Norman’s Cay on Saturday, March 3 was great. We had not slept well the night before so this definitely helped us catch up. Little did we realize that we needed to “store up” some sleep, because the next night—Sunday, March 4—was tough. The predicted cold front and all its heavy winds moved in from the east where we had little protection—another rocky night.
We, along with most of the boats at Norman’s, decided to find a better place to anchor. Although the wind was already howling, we put out just a little of the jib and sailed right down to Shroud Cay—it only took a couple of hours. This provided good shelter from the new wind direction—northeast and east. We stayed at Shroud Cay until Friday, March 9th—almost 5 days. Yikes! I got some cleaning & rearranging done in the boat and John made some repairs as one of the brackets holding the wind charger brace needed replacing, etc. Mostly, however, we just read and wrote some blog entries for posting whenever we get to internet. Oh yes, I messed around in the galley a bit—made a no-knead loaf of bread and a pizza. Here are pictures of John reading and hiding from the wind in the cockpit; me writing up some blogs at the nav. desk.
Mostly it was gloomy weather out with occasional rainy squalls and wind, wind, wind without end!
Every now and then the sun would come out, but the wind continued. Here’s a picture of a sunny moment off the bow of Caribbean Soul.
The rocky shore you see in the picture gave us lots of protection until Wednesday night when we had to pull up the anchor and move a bit farther out from the shore—the winds moved more southerly and Capt. John worried that they would push us into the rocks. Yes, the same rocks that had been giving us protection for days.
Other boats were hunkered down at Shroud Cay too. At one point we counted 12 or so boats here.
On Thursday, March 8th I watched a seaplane land right beside a big yacht that had been waiting out the weather just south of us. Then I saw two dinghy loads of people from the big yacht ferried out to the seaplane. Wow! I guess if you have lots of money and your are tired of being trapped on a boat for 4 or 5 days, you just radio a seaplane to come pick you up. Impressive! If you look closely, you can see the yacht and the seaplane in this picture.
We continued to listen to all the weather information we could find on single sideband radio and our SkyMate satellite system. It seemed that a small window of reasonable travel weather was coming up on Friday and Saturday, March 9 and 10. We studied out charts and decided to do a day-long run on the less-wavy banks side of the islands on Friday hoping to give the big waves on the deep seas of the Exuma Sound time to calm down a bit before we tried sailing to George Town on Saturday.
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