Blog 3: Cruise of Panacea

­Cruise of Panacea

Blog 3 2017

Panorama of Nassau Harbour

We sheltered at Big Majors Spot for several days while that cold front passed. As usual when we are ‘trapped’ on the boat, we just lay around reading or doing puzzles. There are always minor boat repairs to be dealt with, this time including a window leak above the electrical panel. In general, things go pretty slowwww!

Susan and I took the inflatable one morning while the winds continued high and crept along the shore, hoping to arrive at Isles General Store without getting soaked with spray from the north winds. Alas, the outboard quit. It stopped dead from full throttle, as if I had pulled the curly cord off the kill switch. I squeezed the fuel bulb. Nope: rock solid. I removed the curly cord and re-attached it. Still no joy. Detach and reattached the fuel line. No again. Oh crap! This engine is practically brand new.

Just as I was about to bend my back to the oars, a cheerful fellow on a Yamaha Wave-Runner came along and asked if we would like a tow. “Yes please!” said we in chorus, displaying our best ‘warm and friendly’ smiles. In a moment we were tied behind him and in two moments we were getting drenched by his water squirter, the jet of by-pass water that tells any jet-ski operator that his raw water pump is functioning correctly to cool his engine. On the principle that we were not going to look a ‘gift-horse’ in the mouth, we stayed the course (translation: we took a ‘hosing’) and arrived back at Panacea to be greeted by Tristan.

With another cheery wave, the jet-ski driver left us. Susan and I climbed aboard and dried off as Tristan started the outboard on the first pull. I didn’t feel like ‘chancing it’ again, so we went on an egg-free diet for a while. I’ll never trust that outboard again, which is too bad because it is almost brand new, and we are likely to have it for years to come. Events like this were not rare with the Honda outboard that this Tohatsu replaced last year.

We have had a couple of invites to go out for sundowners, but have not taken these up, mainly due to the distances needing to be travelled by tender after dark. My sense of adventure must be running to the ‘chicken’ side lately.

On the lighter side, our old buddy from Sturm undt Drang arrived in the anchorage yesterday and immediately went into Boot Key Rodeo mode, touring from boat to boat like a bareback circus rider. He dropped by our boat on the pretext of trying to exchange DVD movies. I still have nothing to say to this bird, exactly 12 months after our last conversation when he was a fount of advice about how our boat should be anchored. His advice was wrong at the time and he was a real pest about it. At that time he suggested that if I couldn't do it his way, I should remove my national flag so as not to bring shame on the country. He still doesn’t seem inclined to mind his own business.

A day later we had moved 7 miles down the Exuma chain to the Great Guana Cay and the lovely town of Black Point Beach. Susan and I visited the Laundromat and found a few needed grocery items. Prices are not necessarily cheap at $5.00 US for a dozen eggs, but the selection complimented that of Isles General Store, back in Staniel Cay.

While the washers and dryers cycled, we chatted with other cruisers at the Scorpio Sports Bar, our favourite every year. Tristan arrived after parking at a more distant wharf with further tales of woe regarding the baulky outboard engine and treated us to fish burgers and Grouper fingers. Excellent fare!

True to expectations the outboard failed us again when it was time to return aboard. Once again we were towed back to Panacea by others, this time fellow cruisers from a nearby catamaran.

This time Tristan finally decided that the cause of engine stoppage was unlikely to be operator error. Of course this time he was driving ! He dismantled the fuel system and purged it, finding nothing wrong. When he checked the oil, he found it to be ‘marginally’ low and on adding a little the engine ran fine. The culprit was presumed to be an oil level shutdown switch. Maybe this had been one of those ‘get to know your new engine’ events.

We enjoyed sundowners aboard Spira Serpula with friends Bill and Gayle. They are marine biologists and spend a lot of time in the islands diving reefs and documenting their observations on her blog, cruisingbiologists.com .

We remained in Black Point until Monday, waiting until the incoming tide had slowed before passing through Dotham Cut for the motor-sail to Georgetown. The anchor was up in Black Point at 7:58 a.m. and anchor went down at Monument Beach in our favourite little hole alongside a low cliff at 2:09 p.m. Our trip average was six and a half knots, which is a respectable cruise speed for our twenty-seven foot waterline length.

Sunset on the fleet at Monument Beach

I had worn my parka in the northerly breeze at dawn but finally we have come far enough south that the temperature won’t likely drop below 75 degrees F again. This means that finally we are far enough south to stay warm.. I am hoping that the parka will stay put away for the rest of our cruising season.

We joined a growing fleet of cruisers, mostly in sailboats. Estimates stood at 200 boats in harbour at the time of our arrival. The daily influx is between five and ten boats, although a significant number are leaving too. The Georgetown Regatta starts in ten days, and many of the cruisers come here specifically for that event.

Susan announced our arrival on the morning 'cruisers net', only to later hear another Panacea announce their own arrival only moments later. Maybe we will have a Panacea regatta here.

After another day of outboard problems, Tristan seems to be making some progress. This time he found that the fuel pump bolts had loosened, which he suspects of reducing crankcase vacuum that is required for the pump to function correctly. My attitude at this stage is one of: “We’ll see”.

Our first full day saw us swimming at ‘our’ little crescent of sand, known as South Monument Beach. The air was still and the temperature was in the low 80’s. The swim was just delicious. We had been contemplating a brief cruise to other Cays or islands to our south to fill up the time. We decided that the risk of getting ‘storm-stayed’ away from the airport was too strong to chance it until after our guest is aboard.

Volleyball Beach

On the morning of the second day, Tristan and I went to the ‘Treasures of the Bilge’ flea market. There were a few bargains to be found. We anticipate that there will be more on the tables as the fleet grows. The winds grew while we were there and they swung to the south-west as we returned to Panacea. Our nice cliffside anchoring hole near Monument Beach becomes a trap as the wind moves into the west, so we moved to an anchorage that we surveyed from our dinghy last year. We slipped into the lagoon at Goat Cay at high tide with very little water under the keel. We joined two catamarans and a sixty foot Grand Banks Trawler yacht. We were playing an audio-book and the resonant voice from our hull attracted our own personal dolphin. That dolphin stayed with us all afternoon, just circling the boat as our stereo transmitted the readers voice through the hull. This is a ‘happy’ anchorage for us, and the dolphin and our team of geckos seem to be telling us how pleased they are too. The geckos are out and laying around in the heat. We usually only see two at a time, but we are starting to think that there may be a third one.

Two days after arriving in our little lagoon the winds swung to the north and surge effect began to give us a lot of motion. It had crept up on us, and I first noticed it when returning from a walk up the Queens Highway to buy a newspaper. Panacea was bounding all over the place. With the winds expected to move more easterly within twenty-four hours, we decided that we would go back to Stocking Island at high tide the next day. That part of Elizabeth Harbour is very sheltered when winds are from a North-Easterly direction.

The traffic in the Eastern Anchorages is the main downside of anchoring there. Inter-island freighters and tankers pass very close to the anchorages, sometime through yachts at anchor. Open speedboats from the resorts, some sporting a thousand or more horsepower on their transoms, zoom close inshore next to water aerobics classes and swimmers as they shuttle their bikini babes and young dudes to the beach bars. And lastly we have the cruisers themselves, dinghying ceaselessly, on errands for food, water, fuel, and alcohol – and pursuing the numerous social activities that this ‘destination’ offers the cruising boater.

Finally the day arrives. Claire’s BahamasAir flight and a brief taxi ride deliver her to Tristan. She will be with us for two weeks. At the same time we are rejoined by Bonavista which dropped anchor beside us only moments before Claire came aboard. With their fuel feed issue finally resolved, Craig and Sharon plan to go on to the Virgin Islands this spring, if circumstances allow.

As we again raise anchor to evade moderately high westerly winds (a manoever referred to hereabouts as 'the Georgetown Shuffle'), I see a figure waving arms from a blue boat as we motor past. Tristan turned to close with the boat and as we got closer, we recognized Joe and Yvonne on Osprey J, also just arrived in Georgetown. We will get together later and bring each-other up to date.

During this ‘shuffle’ we explored another new (for us) anchorage on the West side of Elizabeth Harbour. I took soundings and concluded that the charts err on the side of caution with the depths near the abandoned Out Island Resort,just north of the government docks. We were very close inshore in nine feet of water. This turned out to be a good move for we were told subsequently of several boats colliding in the darkness as anchors dragged over at Monument Beach and Sand Dollar Beach.

We remained on the West side of the harbour to facilitate fuel and food top-ups, before sailing north, back to Black Point Beach. It was another fast trip for us to Black Point Beach and Staniel Cay. We stayed for several days, just seeing the sights and diving in Thunderball Cave.

A lot of the 1965 James Bond film Thunderball was filmed at Staniel Cay.  Pictures of the film cast dining at Staniel Cay Yacht Club still adorn the walls of that establishment.

On Claire's Bucket list

One of main attractions in Big Majors is feeding the pigs. Several pigs died simultaneously this season and the theories abounded that the pigs had been poisoned by tourists. We have yet to see the toxicology reports, but the government veterinarian opined that the seven pigs in question were a) parched, with inadequate fresh water available , and b) had ingested large amounts of sand, which they could not pass in their desiccated state. Tristan and Claire visited with the pigs and Tristan reported that one in particular, a young female, 'showed-off' for him, chortling and nudging him.

We moved northward to the Warderick Wells Nature Park despite strong Easterly winds. Anchoring at Bell Island, owned by the Agga Khan, we did not find sound holding and likewise at Johnny Depp’s Island just to the north. We decided to go to Cambridge Cay and rent a mooring ball to wait for the winds to subside. Unfortunately we were optimistic. The winds pushed the falling tide into huge breakers in Bell Cut. Panacea was literally leaping from wave-top to wave-top as we tried to approach the Cambridge Cay mooring field. Our prospects for safely entering the channel dropped to a low percent when we saw that we would be abeam of the violent waves for a few hundred yards with a reef close on our leeward side.When we finally decided to turn and run westward we had left it ‘almost’ too late. Fortunately we did not roll on our beam-ends in getting turned around.

Agga Khan's place on Bell Island

Waves breaking at Bells Cut'

As we motored back to the lee side of Bell Island, Susan’s head popped up out of the companionway. “What was that?” she asked.

Claire, Tristan and I had forgotten to call a warning to her as the situation deteriorated. It had only seemed to take a few moments for us to get really into trouble and the violent seas captured all of our attentions.

We left the neighbourhood and sailed to the western anchorage of Warderick Wells, taking a mooring ball close to the beach. Tristan and Claire toured the dive spots as were accessible in the high winds. Next morning we moved on to Shroud Cay where Tristan and Claire toured the channels through the island. Tristan arrived back in late afternoon to advise that a sailboat on the opposite end of the mooring field had a Port of Registry of Rothesay. As the sun got low in the sky I visited her to extend greetings. Mariposa is the Catalina 34 of Joe and Cathy Holmes of Sussex. With only a brief conversation we parted on the next morning, they travelling South, we going north.

The winds had diminished and we decided to use to brief lull that had been forecast to return to Nassau, as winds were expected to rise to over 30 knots and stay there for a number of days.

This turned out to be a good call. We arrived in New Providence after a beautiful cruising day and were securely tied to a dock when the high winds arrived – exactly as forecast. We spent the next day in downtown Nassau. Six cruise ships were in and the downtown was ‘jumping’.

Claire and Tristan went off in search of a Wendy’s for their lunch while Sue and I enjoyed lunch at Nassau Yacht Haven, where I had the very best ½ pound Angus burger I have ever eaten.

Best Burger ever

Conch Shacks

I don’t think that I have ever stopped eating to take a photo of my food before, but I did this time. What a great burger! And the price was the same as if we had gone to one of the ‘conch shacks’ under the Paradise Island Bridge.

The forecast says that winds here will continue strong, so we will stay snug at the dock until they diminish. By then Claire will be in Halifax and Tristan in Fort McMurray.