Titles can be tricky

Titles can be tricky

Thursday 17th and Friday 18th April, 2025

When Mike went up the mast on Wednesday afternoon to take photos, he noticed a fraying area on the main halyard.  Consequently, on Thursday morning after breakfast, we found a length of Dynema to use as a messenger line.  Mike tied the Dynema to the tail end of the main halyard.  I fed out the messenger line as Mike pulled the halyard down onto the deck. (Naturally, he had to detach the end from the sail in order to do this.)  As we  got close to pulling the whole halyard down, it became obvious that the Dynema line wasn’t long enough!  There was a bit of a mad scramble to find another piece of line and attach it.  Once the halyard was on the deck, I could see the area of wear was on a section that had an anti-chafe guard installed.  It’s a bit of a mystery why this chafe had occurred.  Fortunately, we had some chafe guard material on board.  We fed this along the halyard from the tail to the spliced end.  Mike then lashed it in place with some rigging twine.  Then we reattached the messenger line and pulled the halyard back up the mast.  Once it was fed through all the correct turning blocks and the rope clutch, we were back in business.

Next on the day’s agenda was a snorkel trip.  Having studied the “not to scale” hand drawn map of snorkel spots, we elected to go to the area near mooring ball number one.  We zipped over in the dinghy at about what we thought would be slack water.  A couple of boats were already tied to the dinghy mooring.  We joined them and swam around the tip of a mini island.  There were plenty of fish, coral and sponges.  The clarity of the water was amazing.  Not far from the shore of the small island, the bottom fell away but it was possible to see down to the deeper area quite clearly.  We did observe the arrival of a Bahamas Defense Force vessel.  This was something of a distraction as they launched their dinghy and motored off at great speed (noisy in the water!).  We did see a huge barracuda stationary on a section of reef with it’s mouth wide open! What a sight!  Thankfully it swam off.  

Having had such a successful swim, we decided to go on to another spot on the map.  This small cay was on the other side of Waderick Cut, but because it was close to slack tide it didn’t seem like a tough dinghy ride.  We anchored the dinghy, slid into the water and swam northwest along the shoreline, looking at fish and coral.  After a bit we realized that we were being pushed along quite fast by a strong current.  We agreed that it was time to turn back.  At first it seemed like we were not making any progress.  More vigorous kicking was implemented.  I made the mistake of looking up toward the dinghy.  It seemed an impossible distance away.  By this point I was out of breath and quite panicky.  We stopped holding hands and swam independently, allowing us to use our arms properly.  After a while Mike resumed snorkeling, while I carried on swimming until I got near the dinghy. I thought it would be a bad idea to jump back in the dinghy after such a panic. I forced myself to calm down and look around. Being out of the current, I was able to swim around and inspect the fish (near to the safety of the dinghy, of course!). We were rewarded by the sight of an enormous lobster.

After lunch and a rest, we went to the headquarters building and paid for another night of mooring.  Returning to Cotinga, we started to make preparations for our departure on Friday morning. Tasks like taking the engine off the dinghy, putting the dinghy on the davits, topping up the water tank from the jerries, topping up the diesel tank and tidying up the cockpit.

This morning, we left Warderick Wells and genoa sailed up to Hawksbill Cay.  We were happy to find an empty mooring in the south mooring field.  Later this afternoon, we hope to take a walk on shore.    

Gloria

24 28.042 N, 76 46.189 W

It's hard to get a good perspective on Warderick Wells, so I had gloria haul me up the mast to take photos from 'up top'

The north mooring field - looking south towards the Park Headquarters. The Emerald Rock (south) mooring field is through teh narrow channel (dinghy only) and beyond the Park Headquarters.

The north mooring field - looking north towards the entrance channel

The north mooring field - looking east towards Exuma Sound, behind the barrier island

Large Rays seen from our dinghy. We snorkeled with a group of 12 Eagle Rays in the "Rangers Garden" on the previous day - absolutely amazing.

Gloria on the rocks above Exuma Sound

A rare photo of Mike on the cliffs near Pirate's Lair (Gloria's iPhone)

I have been trying to generate panoramas from sets of wiide-angle photos. However, it's a bit hit or miss whether the computer can align the images correctly. In this case 'not' ... so I created this 6-frame collage of Exuma Sound, avoiding the overlay and concentrating on keeping the horizon level