Goodbye Exumas, Hello Eleuthera

2/23 - We woke this morning to dead calm. We’ve never seen it this quiet since arriving in the Bahamas. It is like the boat is sitting in a big bathtub 8 feet deep. You can see every grain of sand on the bottom – absolutely incredible. In addition, there was a slight bit of fog (more like heavy air) that hung in the air at sunrise. The effect was surreal. We spent the better part of an hour just walking around the boat, looking at the bottom, and watching the colors of the landscape change as the sun came up.

Even bringing up the anchor today was unbelievable. We could see the entire length of chain as it lazily wound around the boat from our nights slow swinging with the tide change. We finally were underway around 8:00 a.m. heading for the cut at Norman’s Cay. On the way, our eyes remained glued to the bottom as we spotted more starfish, sand dollars, conch, turtles and rays. The only motion on the water’s surface was from our wake as we passed through.

Now for the bad news – a day like today with perfectly flat seas does not make for good fishing. Consequently neither boat caught any fish today. The passage to Eleuthera was, in a word, quite boring – but we’ll take that any day over rough high seas. We arrived at the Cape Eleuthera Resort and Yacht Club at 1:30. This is a nice facility that includes townhomes/villas for rent, a nice little restaurant, a shop called Out Island Outfitters (however food was limited and quite expensive so we’ll wait to provision at Rock Sound) and a laundry. After 2 weeks of no laundromats, we’ll make good use of that. After happy hour on Second Star, we had dinner at the restaurant (also about 2 weeks since we’d eaten out). We had their pizza, which was quite good, along with some wine and enjoyed the good company, beautiful views and perfect weather.

The early morning landscape

Sunrise

If you're not interested in looking at anchor pictures, just skip
through the next several shots -- but, being from the
Chesapeake where you can't see a foot below the
surface, we find it incredible to be able to see the
anchor.  This morning, because there was no
movement on the water, the anchor and its chain were
even clearer.  This is a shot of the chain, winding
around in front of the boat.

This is the anchor buried -- all you can see is the
shank -- the flukes are totally buried.

Here, most of the chain has been brought in and the
shank is now out of the sand and almost upright (flukes are
still buried however)

We have now motored directly over the anchor, and
with the shank totally upright, the flukes are now
out of the sand and the anchor is free.

Second Star behind trying to spot a large turtle
we had just cruised by

Without movement on the water, we had a
good reflection of the boat.  Linda is
on the bow waving.

A ray swam towards the boat



This is what we saw during our crossing.  Beautiful blue
flat water.  Here the water is over 3,000 feet.



Approaching Eleuthera (Powell Point)

Entering the marina

The boats at the dock

The beach just off the marina