BradenandErin

Yesterday looked like this...

Not very good weather for snorkeling or hiking. We spent the day just laying around the boat. Today the rain stayed away, but it was still pretty windy. We headed over to the sandbar and spent the afternoon there. Since the weather hasn't been the best we extended our stay here a couple days. Right now its looking like Saturday will be the day for us to head to the next spot... lets hope the weather keeps getting better.

We only have limited internet usage here and its pretty slow, so we haven't updated our photos in a few days. As soon as we get to a place that has a better internet connection we'll upload them.

Today we hiked some trails to get a good picture of the boat.

One of the places in the park is Boo Boo Hill, where boaters leave signs with their boat names on it. We checked it out today and I will be working on a sign to take up there tomorrow. We didn't get to snorkeling today, but I've been dying to use our new underwater camera to take pictures of something other than a coconut in our propeller... so tomorrow we're snorkeling.

We pulled up the anchor in Norman's Cay on Monday morning and headed for Warderick Wells. It is part of the Exuma Cays Land and Sea park and is by far the most beautiful place we've been on this trip. We practically have our own private beach right behind our boat. Its just a short swim or dinghy ride away.

We got to our mooring ball around 1:00 PM, had a quick lunch and spent the afternoon on the beach. Tomorrow we plan to check out some of the trails and maybe snorkel. Until then we're looking forward to a really good night's sleep tonight.

We'll probably be here until Wednesday, then think about heading to our next destination - Staniel Cay - on Thursday.

We left Nassau just after 8:30 AM on Saturday and pulled into the anchorage at Norman's Cay around 4:30 PM. We had macaroni and cheese with hotdogs for dinner - a favorite meal from college - and spent the rest of the evening with a bottle of champagne and some reading.

On Sunday we checked out the plane wreckage by dinghy. Then headed to Norman's Cay Beach Club, which has 4 villas and a restaurant. We had lunch at the restaurant, and spent the rest of the afternoon drinking local Bahamian beer and chatting with the locals and other cruisers.

We'll be pulling out of Nassau very shortly!  Hopefully this works this time... To see where we are click here.

Where to go next...? The Exumas is a chain of 365 islands so we have lots of places to choose from.

Our original plan was to stop at Allen's Cay, see the iguanas and maybe spend a day. The anchorage at Allen's Cay is notorious for being crowded, and we don't like crowded anchorages. The possibility to bump into someones boat or someones boat bump into yours - in the middle of the night - is not something we enjoy. A boat just pulled in next to us today who came from Allen's Cay. They said it was crowded last night, and they had to move in the middle of the night to avoid collision with other boats. No thank you.

So we're thinking about skipping it and heading straight to Norman's Cay. The anchorage there is supposed to be much better. Norman's main attraction is a plane wreckage from the '80s. Its supposed to be some pretty cool snorkeling. The distance from Nassau to Norman's Cay is about 35 nautical miles, which would take us about 9 hours. We plan to head out around 8 AM tomorrow.

To our mothers: We probably won't have internet connection for a couple days. Don't panic! We'll be on the Bahama bank, not in open ocean... and we expect there will be plenty of other boats around. We will update the website as soon as we have internet connection. That will probably be in Warderick Wells in a couple of days.

Last night we watched a spotted eagle ray swimming around the boat. 

Yesterday was one month since we pulled out of Loggerhead Marina in Palm Beach Gardens and started our sailing adventure.