Today is Wednesday, January 28, 2009 and we headed out early so we could transit the swift currents in Current Island Cut while they were flowing south. The cruising charts note that slow boats (i.e., sailboats) cannot get through the Cut if the wind and the current are against you. We, however, made it through just fine catching the south-bound tide just as it was slowing down. Then we rolled out the sails and had a lovely sail down to Ship Channel Cay.
Pictured here is John tending the fishing line that our Beaufort neighbor, Doug Mercer, outfitted us with. Too bad he couldn’t also provide his expertise—we didn’t catch anything—perhaps we were going too slow?
This picture may look like lots of water, but please look carefully along the horizon on the right. This is Finley Cay—yay! So, Finley, there do not seem to be any towns/people or roads/cars on your island. Perhaps they are just waiting for your civil engineering expertise?
And, after staring at Finley’s place for a while, we began searching for the dangerous coral heads our chart warned us about. The problem was, however, we didn’t really know how to find them. Our information said to look for dark spots in the water, but honestly the lovely Exuma Banks that stayed about 10 to 15 feet deep had lots of dark spots made by the puffy little white clouds in the sky and patches of grass. It wasn’t until the Banks shallowed down to a consistent 7 to 8 feet that we learned quickly how to identify the very black coral heads rising almost to the water’s surface—yikes! Running into one of those things would do some serious damage to your keel (and it’s not too good for the coral either). So, in the picture below, you can see John performing the coral watch out on the bow. It works great—he’d just point in the direction I needed to steer the boat to avoid the coral. Woohoo—we scooted through with no problems.
In this picture, you can see what coral watchers do when there are no coral heads—they watch the jib. I took these pictures across the bimini and solar cells that you can see in the foreground.
And in this final picture for today, you can see a long river of sargassum. As we approached, we weren’t at all sure what it was—maybe sea weed, but maybe a long narrow reef rising just above the surface or maybe the edge of the earth (neither good things). But—what do you do when the brown line stretches from as far as you can see left and right? Well, you take a deep breath, say a prayer, and sail on! We did and we’re still sailing on and on. We made it to Ship Channel Cay and anchored for the night.
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