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Tuesday, March 21st - Warderick Wells, Bahamas
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Warderick Wells is the headquarters for the
Exuma Cays Land and
Sea Park. The island itself is one of 15 major
cays and numerous smaller ones that make up the 176
square mile park area that stretches from north to south
along 22 miles of the Exuma chain. There are no
commercial developments within the park and the only
inhabited islands are privately owned. It is truly
a pristine swatch of nature. It is prohibited to
take any plant, animal or marine life, including corals
and shells, from within the park area. The Bahamas
National Trust overseas the park operations with the
goal of preserving the rich flora and fauna and marine
life in this area for future generations. The
increase in visitors to the Bahamas over the years has
seriously depleted the natural resources in the islands
and the Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park is one way of
fighting back.
We
arrived here in the company of LEGARIS on Friday, the
17th. We sailed from Staniel Cay up the banks side
as opposed to the deeper ocean side of the islands.
Of course, it never occurred to Joe or Georg to use this
opportunity to gauge who had the faster boat (yea,
right!). ZIA had the advantage of the better
navigation software, so we took off in the lead.
Although the wind was light, it was a nice reach for the
first 10 miles so we decided to hoist the main, just for
a change. It had been the beginning of the month
on the passage to George Town since we had last seen our
sails. While we were at it, we unfurled the big
genniker and backed off on the engines. The
passage was a short 18 miles, so we could afford to go
slowly. Luckily, the wind increased after about 5
minutes of creeping along at 3.5 knots. We wound
up having a very nice sail until we had to turn on the
engines for the last 2 miles of upwind travel. The
wind was oscillating so Joe set the autopilot to "vane"
which turns the boat to keep the wind angle the same
rather than following a set course. This was
hugely frustrating to poor LEGARIS who was trying to
follow us, so they finally gave up and made their own
course.
Over tacos on ZIA that night, Nathalie and I exchanged
stories about how the boys "weren't racing" and the
lengths they went to in order to "just sail." Sail
trim, dagger boards and wind angle were never such
important features of a casual sail. In truth, our
boats are a bit different in sail configuration, making
ZIA a little better in winds behind the beam, and
LEGARIS better with the winds just fore of the beam.
At least that was my take on it. What do you
think, Georg?
We
were very sorry to see Georg, Nathalie and Anthonia
leave early the next morning. We won't see them
again until we hit the Med this summer/fall. We
will always be grateful to Nathalie, who took the
initiative to come over to us in Marigot, St. Martin
after seeing that we had two little girls on the boat.
She introduced herself and Anthonia and arranged a
play-date for later that day. THIS is why we are
out cruising!
Ever in pursuit of a good wireless connection, we moved
over to the mooring field where we could pick up the $10
a day signal and "plug in" to our hearts' content.
I finally convinced my family to sign up for
skype which allows us
to talk to them over the computer for free. My
sister, Kathy, and her family live in Bellingham,
Washington, about an hour and three quarters from my
parents in Woodinville. They were all having
dinner together in Bellingham and we arranged a skype
session for Sunday night. Luckily, the connection
held up. The next day we started having problems
with it and wondered if we had used up too much
bandwidth and forced them to change some setting that
restricted such abuse! In addition to the
Bellingham phone call, we managed to talk to the
Dunoyers in Severna Park and my sister Kim.
Unfortunately, by the time I tried to get in touch with
Hope, the connection got funky and email wound up being
a much less painful means of communication. Its
hard to complain about virtually free phone calls back
home, so we didn't feel too bad.
The other drawback of the internet connection is that
some setting on the server prevented me from connecting
to the website with FrontPage so I could not post an
update. We have loads of great pictures of
Warderick Wells but I'll have to add them to the photo
pages whenever we get another connection. I'll
wind up posting this update via satellite phone which is
too slow to upload pictures. Oh well.
So, Warderick Wells is a very cool place. They
have a bunch of hiking trails set up throughout the
island. I actually managed to get out and "jog" on
them for the first time in ages. They wind through
the palm trees and beaches, over the riverbed and
through the "flats." Most of them are quite rocky
and uneven so jogging might be a little generous for the
activity level I managed, but it felt good nonetheless.
We took the girls on a hike to the infamous Boo Boo
Hill. Here, it is told, the ghosts of the souls
who perished on a schooner that sank here many years ago
can be heard at the bloom of the full moon.
Somehow, a cruising tradition has developed so that
boats that pass through the area leave a memento of some
sort at the crest of Boo Boo Hill. We found
BLUEPRINT MATCH's plaque as well as a couple of other
boats that we had met on our travels. We left our
own memento after much thought and deliberation.
We didn't have any good paint or tools for making a
wooden plaque so we wound up decorating a few sand
dollars (that we had collected elsewhere) with the Zia
symbol.
We
spent our mornings cranking through school. In the
afternoon we went on little expeditions to snorkel or to
the beach or to hike a trail. There was a
"cocktail hour" on the beach on Saturday night,
organized by Exuma Park. We met a bunch of fellow
cruisers and exchanged many stories and a lot of good
information. The girls were quite the hit.
The mooring field where we were staying is in the shape
of a horseshoe with a very shallow sandbar defining the
middle of it. We had dropped the girls off there
to play on our way back from the beach one day. They
spent an hour or so building sand castles and running in
the ankle deep water, walking up to the boat and asking
for a lift across the 20 feet of deep water when they
were ready to come home. Our neighbors were
delighted to see them having so much fun and taking such
great advantage of their circumstances. We were
just happy to have an hour to ourselves!
We
have moved back south a little ways, to Bell Island.
There is supposed to be some great snorkeling here.
We are still within the boundary of the Exuma Park, so
there isn't much to do ashore, but that is just fine
with us. Our only major concern is provisioning
and I could probably still feed us all for several weeks
to come with all the food I have onboard! I
imagine we will want to move on to a more developed
location before too long, but we'll see.......
All our best,
Christy, Joe, Cassie and Juliana
Next entry
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Many thanks to our
friend Craig Homenko for his assistance in setting up
the website.
We also would like
to thank our buddy Scott Brunner who has been kind
enough to host the website on his server.
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