Day 148, Year 10: Chub Cay to Rose Island (East of Nassau)
Date: Saturday, March 7, 2015
Weather: Beautiful Weather for Motoring, Winds E 5, Flat Seas
Latitude: 25 04.997 N
Longitude: 077 12.681W
Location: Anchored on the South Side of Rose Island, Just East of Nassau
It was a beautiful day . . . for motoring, but not for sailing. But still it was a beautiful day. Lee has a theory about sail boats. I’m not sure I have the theory exactly right, but I think it is basically that sailboats have a magnet in the bow that attracts wind. Therefore, you are always sailing directly into the wind. And it seems that we either have winds on the nose or we have winds directly behind us. I guess that would be the opposite theory that states there is a magnet on the stern of the boat attracting wind to it. We haven’t had a lot of great sailing days since leaving South Carolina in late December, but we are still having fun.
Windbird and Sea Turtle left the anchorage at Chub Cay just before 8 am this morning and motored the 44 miles due east to Rose Island. This is a small island to the east of New Providence Island, home of Nassau. We had no desire to get this close to Nassau, but there is really no other anchorage between Chub Cay and the Exumas. And tomorrow we will be entering waters where there are coral heads making an overnight impossible. So Rose Island is our home for one night. Tomorrow night we will be in the Exumas, hopefully anchored off Normans Cay. We won’t get there until very late in the afternoon, so we hope to do a little exploring on Monday morning before heading further south to Shroud Cay. The reason we will get there late in the day is because we have to time our departure here to reach the area between the Yellow and White Banks where there are scattered coral heads when the sun is high in the sky. That area is only two hours from here, so we can’t leave too early. And this brings up a time question. Chris Parker, our weather guru, announced this week that the time changes tonight to Eastern Daylight Time, at least the time for his broadcasts. What we don’t know for sure is whether or not the Bahamas go to Eastern Daylight or stay on Eastern Standard. The tide charts we have indicate that they do. So until we find out for sure (not easy without internet), we will spring forward and go with Eastern Daylight. And that brings up the internet issue. Phone and internet issue here is tricky. Our provider is AT&T and we could have paid to have limited service. But it was very limited. Or we could purchase a SIM card here and buy time for Bahamian phone and internet service, but this comes at a greater cost than we are willing to pay. Our solution was to simply turn off our phones. We use our HAM radio for email communication and we will buy wifi time when it is available. That means that photos will be posted only when we have wifi available and it also means that we can’t look up the answers to simple questions. How did we ever function without the internet?
When we got to Rose Island it was almost 6 pm. It took us longer to get here than expected as we had adverse current most of the day. We launched our dinghy and Mark went over to pick up Lynda and Lee. We invited them to come over so we could have a planning meeting. We spent an hour discussing our schedule for the next couple of weeks. We have a basic plan, but the details have to be decided each morning after we hear the latest weather report. This week we will be heading south and the winds will be coming from the SE, stronger on some days than others. So we’ll try to match our travel days to the days with least wind. It looks like we could have really strong winds on Friday, so we’ll want to tuck into a good anchorage before then to ride out the winds. It seems that you have to be on constant weather watch in these parts.
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| 150307 Day 148 Bahamas–Chub Cay to Rose Island |
