White Sound, Green Turtle Cay

April 3, 2012

Well, we are back online a little sooner than planned...

We are moored in White Sound on Green Turtle Cay.  We had planned to spend several days on the uninhabited cays north of here before arriving at this cay, but crusing has a way of changing plans.

As we mentioned in our last post, the more remote cays have no cell phone or internet access.  Also, the Bahamas, somewhat inexplicably, do not have any VHF marine weather service like we have in the states. Thus you need alternate means to get weather, one of which are so called weather faxes.  These are weather maps that you can receive over a HF radio.  We had planned to get these over my portable HF radio, but technical difficulties (including a computer that died) made that imposible.

Anchoring without good weather information can be dangerous, so we decided to head to Green Turtle where we can get internet. 

This will allow us to get weather information, but more importantly, allow us to set up our satelite phone so we can receive weather on that device.  It is more expensive, but will work anywhere in the world.

Just a few notes on our days in the northern Bahamas.  We anchored for two nights at Great Sale Cay.  This is a major stopping off point as boats enter and exit the northern Bahamas - not that scenic.

We then anchored at Allans-Pensecola Cay.   This is cute cay with a trail to the beach.  We had been told about the beautiful trail to the beach, but we didn't ask where to access it, since we thought it would be obvious.  We ended up on a very wild trail that needed bushwhacking in places...not the beautiful trail we were envisioning.  As we were finally reaching the beach, we found the real trail.  Lesson learned...when someone tells you about something, be sure to get good directions for finding it. 

I will close with a story about our stay at Allans-Pensecola and weather information.  We had talked to two boats in the anchorage at Allans-Pensecola.  Both had fairly sophisticated weather systems and freely shared their information.  At around 1:00AM on our first night there, a squall from the cold front that was not 'supposed' to push this far south, hit with winds around 30 knots.  Complicating the situation was that it put us on a 'lee shore'.  That means that the very hard shoreline was about 200 yards downwind; if our anchor had not held, we would have been been crashing on the shore in minutes. Needless to say, I spent several hours that night in the cockpit monitoring the situation.

Good ending - we held fine.  However, one of the other boats we talked to dragged their anchor and had to reset it- no harm, but a fire drill in the middle of the night. 

Moral of the story - not even the best weather information protects you completely!

Tom
Moored in White Sound
Green Turtle Cay
Abacos, Bahamas
http://g.co/maps/r82nj