Monday, February 13:

Sorry if you were looking for our Tracker earlier.  It was so busy getting all of our gear out of the cottage and getting underway that I forgot to turn it on!

We made MANY trips with the dinghy back and forth with our stuff (yikes have we got a lot of stuff!) and finally left the anchorage behind the house around noon.

We sailed out of the Sound and worked our way through the Shifting Sands off of Cape Eleuthera. Exciting stuff trying to figure out if those breakers we saw in the distance meant shallow water!!!!  Or if the dark patches really were coral heads (yep)  or if the really really light coloured water was really shallow water (yep). One really needs to navigate by eye and not trust the electronic charts.  The key is the not have the sun in your eyes. I’d hate to round Cape Eleuthera in the dark! But all was good and we were very careful.

It was a beautiful afternoon of sailing around the Cape and south along the shore to Deep Creek. Light breeze, sunny but cool in the shade. We clipped along under main and Jib at about 6-8 knots. Going south we put the screecher up (the big light wind sail)  as we headed for Deep Creek.

We crept our way into the well-charted entrance …which we knew was shallow, thinking we could drop the hook near the mouth when we touched bottom.  Dang.  No worries, it was all sand.  Saw a sea turtle and some kind of big fish about 4′ long zooming around.

We turned out of the mouth and are now anchored just outside in about 6′ of shallow bottom.

The boys have the BBQ going and we’ll do supper soon.

By the way, we may soon be in areas with limited cell range but I will try to blog when I can.

Here is Jim looking pretty comfy at the helm. The deep water is indigo!

Paul having a well-earned rest in the shade earlier as we were sailing along.

The mouth of Deep Creek and our celebratory beverages on our solar panels.

First sunset at anchor.