The wind was higher than the forecast so we were happy that we accidentally left the 3rd reef in our main sail! It was a great sail over, the crew was busy trying to get as much speed and to point the boat on course as much as possible. We were on a run (wind right on our back) so we had to be careful not to accidentally jibe. It was a very fun balancing act for the 20 nautical miles to Elbow Cay!
The crew had a fun, busy sail. We set up a barber hauler to catch as much wind in the Jib as possible. We also had a preventer on the mainsail at one point. Every time we jibed, we called down to the cockpit for Tim to help us center the main. The main on this 52 ft Lagoon is huge and centering it with the strong winds we were experiencing was challenging. Tim (pictured below) is a strong guy, he’s a retired MN Viking!
The Bahamas are quite shallow, we have a 5 ft draft and some of the areas we need to sail through are only 5 ft deep. The Caribbean and Lake Superior are much deeper so I haven’t had to worry too much about running aground but it is more of a possibility here. I’ve been showing Patti, Doreen and Paul how to create a route on iNavX and we can’t always take a direct course due to the depth, We also need to be very aware of the low and high tides and plan accordingly. The narrow part of the channel into Hope Town Marina is only 4 ft deep at low tide so we needed to make good time to get there at or near high tide.
We actually made good time that afternoon and arrived right around high tide so there were no issues getting into the marina.
We typically anchor or tie up to a mooring ball but with 11 people on the catamaran, we didn’t have a lot of flexibility with getting everyone to and from shore so we decided to spend the night at the marina dock. It’s very expensive – $2.60/ft so $135.20 plus water and electricity as we weren’t allowed to run our generator. Anyway, the marina was very nice and they had a shuttle (pontoon boat) that would bring us over to Hope Town and back. There were a couple of shuttle pontoons so it was never more than a 10 minute wait before one showed up.
Some of our group went over to Hope Town and the rest of us took a hike to the lighthouse which is one of the last operational kerosene-fueled lighthouses in the world. It has a weight mechanism that has to be hand cranked every several hours to maintain the sequence of five white flashes every 15 seconds. The lamp burns kerosene with a wick and mantle, at the rate of 1 gallon per night.
Later that evening we all met up for dinner at Captain Jacks in Hope Town. Here are a few more pictures of our day/evening there:
