A Tale of Two Chemists: Tiny hitchhiker

Tiny hitchhiker ... Tuesday 2^nd April 2013

We set off from Shroud Cay this morning at about 9:30 expecting a nice sail up to Allen’s Cay. The distance was only 15 miles so we thought we’d be there pretty early. There was the small problem of wind from the northwest. Leaving the anchorage we headed west to get a northeasterly heading toward the waypoint marking some very shallow water to the east. When we tacked around we found that we couldn’t sail the heading that we needed. We were going at least 15 degrees further east, right toward the shallow area. We had to tack to westward again. After a time we tacked back in the direction of our destination. At this point the wind was more northerly still, making our life more difficult. Our speed had dropped to about 3kt. We had been underway for two hours and had made about 2 miles of progress toward Allen’s Cay. We gave in and motor-sailed the rest of the way.

At one point, I could see an area of breaking water off to the left. I tried to point this out to Mike. When I looked back at the chart plotter, there was something on the toe rail. A palm warbler, probably very tired from flying over the water, was perched on the boat. He seemed quite content to travel along with us for a while. When we turned to windward to drop the mainsail, he flew up and perched on my hat briefly, then landed on the chart plotter.

Arriving at our destination we anchored in the small gap between Allen’s Cay and Leaf Cay, just north of the cleverly named Southwest Allen’s Cay. Within twenty minutes another three boats had arrived and by nightfall there were about twelve boats in this small anchorage. Looking to the south we could see Highbourne Cay. There appeared to be thirty or more boats anchored off the side of that cay. You might just get the sense that bad weather is on the way and everyone is heading for Nassau to ride out the storm. It looked to me like ‘white flight’.

There are a couple of interesting things about this area. The anchorage is subject to a lot of current. Commonly in that situation the boats lie to the current rather than to the wind. Here however the boats seem to lie all helter skelter. At one stage in the evening we were lying anti-parallel to the closest boat. We could see the anchor chain on the bottom lying in a great big circle. More interesting is that Leaf Cay has iguanas on it. I thought that perhaps if you got lucky you might see an iguana. Not so, when a boat lands on the beach there are something like 50 iguanas of all sizes, trotting along expecting a handout. Feeding the iguanas is forbidden but seemingly everyone does.

Tomorrow it’s off to Nassau along with dozens of other boats….

Gloria