April 25th was a calm weather day with a perfect SE wind for going through Whale Cay Cut. Like all cuts in The Bahamas there’s a lot of build up & hype around navigating this one. As long as you time it right according to wind direction, wind speed & tides it’s easy breezy.
Our first stop north of the whale was Green Turtle Cay. A place we only stayed for a night, but would revisit less than a week later. There was a window of calm weather coming for the next few days, and we wanted access to the barrier reef for more snorkeling & spear-fishing because if you haven’t caught on by now, that’s our happy place when we’re not sailing.
We had a solid crew for the trip out to the reef which we always prefer. Something about being on the Atlantic side at least a mile offshore swimming in someone else’s habitat always makes you feel a bit vulnerable. It’s nice to have multiple dinghies with more people!
We were lucky to have settled into a new group of boat buddies after our good friends on Lune departed for Florida. Lune introduced us to the crew on Journey who in turn introduced us to R*Tonic, Aurora, Priority & Maru. Such an incredible crew of sailors. We wouldn’t give up monohull sailing for the world, but wow is it nice to have friends with catamarans! It’s a luxury to have a place for our big group to gather at night for a sundowner, a game of Yahtzee, or in our lucky case one night, grilled elk burgers, courtesy of Journey.
One late afternoon Blue Pearl had an unexpected visitor. Circling the boat was a 9-10 ft tiger shark. We know from other’s first hand experiences, The Abacos are full of bull sharks & tiger sharks. Luckily we’ve still only come across (mostly) uninterested reef sharks when we’re out diving. This is the last thing I’d want to see swimming with me! But she was pretty cool to watch from the safety of the boat.
You probably remember one of our original boat buddies, Steve on Elation. We’d been looking forward to a reunion with him in The Abacos. We parted ways on March 26th back in Eleuthera when he had to move on ahead of us for a crew swap. So you can imagine how excited we were to see him more than a month later, motoring into our anchorage at Manjack on April 27th!
The two boats now reunited set off for Coopers Town to hide from an upcoming blow the next day. There’s been a lot of friendly racing while cruising together all these months. Every sailor knows what I’m talking about. If there’s another boat out there with you, you’re racing each other. I was under strict instruction by Blue Pearl’s Captain to “smoke” Elation on this short passage, having lost to him too many times from the Ragged Islands all the way up to Eleuthera. With me at the helm hand steering (there’s no auto pilot in racing!) and Rocky adjusting the trim, we blew past Steve. Now in fairness, he was towing his dinghy and didn’t bother raising his mainsail for this short sail.
With heavy winds rolling in, we spent the next few days anchored off the little settlement of Coopers Town.
On a hot day we went ashore to explore the little town and happily came across one restaurant open for lunch who was also serving exceptionally cold beers. We decided to treat this as Steve’s birthday meal, since the next day, his actual birthday, came the heavy winds which meant we all stayed aboard our own boats.
As the trend has been going, more goodbyes were in order. Journey, R*Tonic & Priority all picked up anchor to head further west to stage for their crossing to Florida. Steve headed back to Marsh Harbor to pick up crew who would help him sail back to the US. But don’t worry… we’ll still be meeting back up with Elation one last time before a final departure!
-LS
Blue Pearl Sailing 
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