Staniel Cay, Exumas, Bahamas

In the early hours of the morning we are awoken by a change in the wind caused by a large area of squalls, unusually approaching from the south west. Unfortunately this causes wind over tide and the shallow water creates steep waves and rock us uncomfortably as we are held into tide the waves slapping with an uneven and irregular wave pattern making sleep impossible. It is still dark though and even this is preferable to trying to negotiate the reef in the dark, so we lay in bed irritable from lack of sleep having taken a long time to get to sleep because of the heat neither of us has had more than a couple of hours.

As soon as light dawns we up anchor and motor the mile to Galliot Cut and pass into Exuma Sound again, which ironically because of the unusual wind direction is flat calm. We have our breakfast on route as we make it up to the nearest cut to Staniel Cay our destination, Dotham Cut. It’s not far in the calm waters of the sound before we have to pass back on to the Bank side as it is known locally, where people usually go to find the calm water. Today it is just short steep waves and we have 5 miles to cross a 2m deep reef in the low grey cloud until we get in to the relatively deep 4m channel to round the natural harbour of Staniel Cay, which should hopefully be calm. We are both not really in the mood for bad weather having had little sleep so we just grit out teeth and get on with it. I am sat on the coachhouse roof by the mast and Kevin at the helm, both hoping this 2m depth (1m clearance for us) is fairly uniform.

We negotiate the channel into Staniel Cay and a motor fishing boat who obviously knows the waters better than us sneaks round the back and pinches our anchor spot just in front of us. It’s just like being in a supermarket carpark! We take a tour of the bay trying to find somewhere else suitable whilst the rain starts in earnest but the anchoring space is quite limited. Eventually we go alongside the motorboat and get the anchor in to a nice patch of sand and it digs in straight away. We both run into the saloon to dry off. We get the last laugh though as the motorboat besides us drags his anchor in the wind associated with the squall and ends up having to go elsewhere. The monohull beside him is also dragging and they go out in the rain to reset. We are the only ones in the small anchor area backed by a line of reef / rocks that is holding, so it looks like we got the best spot after all.

Once we dry off and have lunch we both decide to go back to bed, as it is still pouring with rain. We get a couple of hours of sleep and the weather hasn’t improved when we wake up so we decide to spend the afternoon on board reading and pottering.