Norman's Cay, March 4-8, 2022

    As a new day dawned anchored off Highborne Cay, we were in the fortunate position of having a very short journey planned for our next hop.  The total distance was only about 12 or 13 miles, so we knew that we should be able to make the trip in roughly 2 hours.  There was also a convenient high tide near midday, so we were able to leave around 10am after we had our coffee and were ready to go and be able to arrive at Norman's with the tide high and the sun high in the sky.  I'll explain the importance of the latter shortly.  I was protecting my banged up finger as best I could, but I still managed to bang it into something or something at least once an hour or so.  I'm learning some new curse words.  Because the trip was so short, we elected to sail using just the forward sail (a genoa in our case).  We still were bopping along on about 6 knots, so we were very content and it is always a nice feeling when you shut down the engines and all is blissfully quiet.  Had we raised the main sail, we would likely have made 8 knots or so.  Some people call just using the foresail "lazy sailing" but we thought it just made sense.  To raise and lower the main is a bit of a production, requiring you to turn the boat into the wind (going in the wrong direction for a moment) and fiddle with a bunch of lines at the mast and then repeat the whole process again at the other end.  The process probably costs 20 minutes and we'd probably have not saved much more time if even that much.  Plus, this gave me fewer opportunities to have something unpleasant happen to my finger.

Dragonfly doesn't mind if I'm lazy.  She was cruising serenely towards Norman's without a care.

     One thing everyone talks about in the Bahamas is something called "reading the water."  It takes on almost mystical status amongst some folks.  The basic idea is that the different colors of the water indicate how deep or shallow things are.  In general, the lighter the colors, the more shallow the water is.  Where it gets tricky is when the bottom is grassy, because then it can look like deeper water when it is not.  Also, darker colors might also indicate shallow coral heads which are super-important to avoid.  Everywhere you go, the charts warn that you shouldn't go there unless you have some skill at reading the water.  Since we've never actually done it, we aren't sure if we have that skill or not.  Norman's is fringed by coral and has beautiful anchoring in just 10-12 feet of water quite close to shore, which is ideal for the coming storm, where we expect winds of 35 knots or even more, strictly from the east.  But first we needed to thread our way past a shallow sand bar and through some coral heads into the anchorage.  The best maps have a suggested route (called "the magenta line" by many cruisers) and one hopes that if there were dangerous patches on the magenta line you would hear lots of complaints.  But its easy to wander off course and we felt like this would be a good place to practice reading the water.

You can clearly see the wide variation in water color found in the Exumas here.

     We followed the line and I called out depths to Lisa so that she could compare what her eyes said to what the computer was reading.  I discovered something extremely annoying about our boat.  When the depth got below 9 feet, it just gave up and started reading "---" instead of providing the actual number.  Unfortunately there are many places in the Bahamas where 6 or 7 feet are pretty standard and it would be very helpful if it kept reading out depths.  I need to see if this is a setting or if my depth gauge just sucks.  I was able to run the split screen with sonar and read the depth that way, but that gives you occasional heart attacks because a fish and a coral head look pretty similar on sonar.  We did safely make our way into the shallow anchorage.  We dropped anchor quite smoothly, setting firmly on the first try.  Once we were anchored, I went forward and tried to help with the bridle attachment, but apparently one-handed people aren't welcome up front during anchoring.  We set the anchor alarm and I kept a watchful eye on it as the winds steadily climbed from 15 to 20 to 25.  By the time we went to bed, the boat had basically been pinned in one spot.  The winds were from a constant direction and once they were strong enough to keep the anchor chain taut, we didn't budge an inch as the winds steadily built.  I had the iPad next to me in bed where I woke up every couple of hours but we never moved an iota even when the winds built to 30.  Well, that's not exactly true.  We bounced up and down and danced a bit side to side as the wind whipped the water around and past us, but we didn't go backwards which was the important bit.

You probably can't really tell, but trust me we were weaving and bobbing energetically out here.

    There wasn't too much to do here, because the winds really made riding in the dinghy unappealing.  We watched a few people and they were getting tossed about and splashed constantly and we didn't feel too enthused about that.  I felt like my finger would complain and Lisa is never really a fan of getting soaked on a dinghy ride.  I did change the watermaker filters and run the watermaker to fill the tank up.  To my great dismay, the watermaker has a pressure gauge that made a loud popping sound like something blew up in it and it started to fill up with water and then leak water out of the front panel.  The prior owner told me that this has happened to him fairly recently, so I suspect there must be some underlying issue.  I was worried that this would lead to a total failure of the watermaker, which would really suck, but so far it is chugging along just fine.  I put a bucket under the gauge to catch the leak and dump an inch or two of water out of the bucket every half hour or so and I'm just hoping it holds together until I can get a replacement part shipped to me.

Water is only supposed to be on the other side of this dial.

Norman's Cay has a colorful history.  In the late 70s a Colombian drug lord named Carlos Lehder began buying up the island.  He planned to use it as a base to import cocaine into the US via small plane and to use the island as a staging area for receiving the coke from Colombia and moving it on.  Unfortunately, there were already other people who owned villas on the island who weren't receptive to being bought out.  After one of the most notable residents who opposed the sale was found dead on his yacht floating offshore, other folks saw the wisdom of selling out and soon Lehder had control of the island.  He paid the prime minister of the Bahamas $88,000 per month for protection from the Bahamian authorities and basically ran his island like a feudal despot.  At one point he was flying 6-8 plane loads of cocaine every night to the US, serving as the primary distribution hub for the Medellin cartel.  His story has been depicted in stuff like Blow,  Narcos, and my personal favorite is the book Turning The Tide: One Man Against the Medellin Cartel which is a fascinating account of this crazy American dive instructor that ultimately led to the collapse of the whole endeavor.  There is a sunken plane that crashed off the foot of the runway in the water which is a well known snorkel spot, but the water was too rough with the high winds while we there for us to make it over.

 The house on the right was the home of the dive instructor

     We decided to use my bad finger as an excuse for Lisa to learn to start the dinghy engine and drive the dinghy, which has heretofore been a job for me.  I quite enjoy being a passenger, even if I did get a bit wet.  We did some exploring of the coast on the last day when it was a bit more calm.  We buzzed by the one restaurant in town, but the Google reviews are full of people asserting that they got food poisoning there.  We decided that once there were more than one or two reviews making that claim that perhaps it wasn't the place for us.  We didn't really see all the sights, but I did recuperate my banged up finger and we did find a perfectly place to wait out the storm, so we'll count all of that as a victory!

 My beautiful taxi driver, who pull started the outboard in less than 20 pulls!