Moved on to Eleuthera

After a little over a week in The Abacos, we waited for a good weather day to make the trip from Little Harbour to Spanish Wells. Wednesday was the day. The wind was forecasted to swing to northerly, which meant an entrance through the narrow and exposed-to-the-north Ridley Head Channel would not be a great idea. We instead pointed for the further but safer Little Egg Island passage. 

We were still with Umbono, Mira’s sister boat and her owners, Pierre and Kris. 

We left at about 8:00 am with a light breeze from the west. Before long that picked up and we hoisted the main and Code 55 and motor sailed for an hour or so. Then the wind swung as forecast and built more. We put away those sails and raised the asymmetrical spinnaker with 15+ knots almost right behind us. 

The wind continued to build to 18,19, with gusts to 22 knts. The asymmetrical is good to about 20 knots, but since we were downwind running, surfing down waves and generally hauling ass, our apparent wind never went above 15 knts, even at the bottom of waves, so the sail wasn’t being stressed nearly as much as the true wind speed indicated. 

On the trip we were routinely in the 8-9s, sometimes consistently in the low 10s and on one particularly fast surf down a wave, hit 13.1knts! We saw apparent wind speeds of 6! (This is what the wind appears to be because our forward speed is negating some of the true wind speed). 

It ended up being a beautiful sailing day; we even went back to the main (reefed since we would be heading towards the wind after turning, thereby making the apparent wind be faster than the true wind speed) and jib as we entered the protected bay south of Royal Island.

We even caught a nice-sized, male Mahi Mahi on the trip on our rod and reel which we were trolling with. It put up quite a fight on the way in but gave us 8 beautiful fillets. 

Chuck was most excited about our catch!

Kris and Pierre were fighting with some sail issues so motored longer than we did and headed for the Bridge Point entrance, to the Northeast of the town of Spanish Wells. We went the longer route but because we were sailing so fast at that wind angle, we both arrived to Spanish Wells within about 2 minutes of each other (after a trip of about 60NM)!

We even had a pod of 4 dolphins swim by both our boats as we set the anchors. 

There is some great snorkeling around here so hopefully we’ll be able to check a bunch out in the coming days.

We spent Thursday walking around Spanish Wells and checked out some shops and got lunch and a drink at Budda’s Snack Shack. 

Then back to Mira to watch a nice sunset from the roof. 

Quick history lesson: Spanish Wells was so named because it was once a Spanish outpost where early sailing ships would stop before their return from the New World with gold and silver riches. They would stop to get provisions (including filling their water supply) before the long trip to Spain.