5-14: Casting Off

Saturday morning dawned bright and clear with a brisk wind from the south southwest, promising a great start to the week. So far the weather has been highs in the low 80’s and low humidity, making sleeping (without air) almost chilly. The morning’s plan was for the crew to split up, some going to the grocery stories to provision for the week while others went to the Moorings Captain’s briefing. Our crew elected for breakfast ashore at Jaime’s Place, a short walk from our marina. Good food, almost ala southern cooking, but unfortunately it came too late for Adrienne & I, having to leave for the 9 AM briefing.
This briefing is something that’s done at all the Moorings we’ve leased boats at. It’s basically a 1 to 1 ½ hour briefing where a knowledgeable staff member briefs the week’s sailors about local conditions, what to do & not to do, interesting places, etc. It was very informative, our briefing being given by Rosie, a young Bahamian with a wry sense of humor; she quickly recognized Glenn from the Fleet as the one to banter with.
Bahamian waters are richly deserving of the briefing. The Sea of Abaco, while containing large areas of open water, also contain many shallow areas and coral reefs, all of which are very user unfriendly and to be avoided at all costs (more on this later). This dictated much more attention and effort be put into navigation, chart reading, using the GPS, etc. than was ever necessary in Croatia. Croatia was very much sailor friendly waters in that the water was very deep almost immediately off shore, obviating any concern for shallows, sand bars and reefs; additionally, Croatia had negligible tidal fluctuation, whereas here these fluctuations are on the order of 2 to 3 feet between high and low tide. Now this might not seem like much, and it’s not as long as you account for the tide going out and your depth of water where your boat’s anchored. Otherwise boat & bottom converge, generally with onerous consequences.
After the briefing, boat provisioning and a general checkout of the boat and its contents, we were ready to cast off. But before, John Lafferty made a presentation to Admiral Jimmy, consisting of an orange and blue burge complete with the Fleet’s logo, as well as a similarly embossed sailing cap. The Admiral, now in his 90’s, is remarkable that he’s still able to negotiate the various steps, ladder’s, docks etc, associated with a cruise of this nature and one bearing his name.
About 2 PM, we were ready to cast off for Great Guana Cay, only about 7-8 nautical miles to the northeast; however winds were from the south/ southwest putting us on pretty much on a run all the way. Actually, we had selected an anchorage at Fisher’s Bay; Fisher’s Bay has a limited number of moorings, floating balls attached to large blocks of concrete on the bottom. The advantage here is that, although it costs $15 to $20 per night, you know your craft is secure for the night and not subject to potential slippage and drift if you rely only on the boat’s anchor securing the boat to the bottom.
So, anyway, we knew there were only a limited number of moorings here and not enough for the entire Fleet (6 boars). Crookshank was one of the last vessels in, so we searched intensely for a mooring. We spotted a white object in the Bay some distance away. Thanking our good fortune, we made our way to the object. As we neared, we realized that something didn’t look quite right, so we changed course and found a good anchorage in the shallows of Fisher’s Bay. We set our anchor successfully and stayed the night adjacent to our boats from the fleet.
It wasn’t until the next morning, as we headed out, that we realized that the unidentified object we almost attached to was actually a marker identifying barely submerged rocks in the Bay! ‘An early object lesson in chart reading in these waters.