Bay of Five Pirates to Hoffman’s Cay, Berry Islands, Bahamas (anchored)
March 28 & 29, 2022
We have had a bit of low bandwidth for a few days.
We spent time on the 28th getting ready to get out of Bay of Five Pirates: putting things away so they wouldn’t go flying when we’re in the open water. Everything that can possibly be put inside a cabinet, even temporarily, gets stashed.
Our plan is to go around the north part of the Berry Islands so we can get into deeper water on the east side (ocean side). The west side is across a huge, shallow shoal. We’re going to go to Hoffman’s Cay to see the blue hole that’s in the middle of the island. It’s supposed to be very cool!
The water on the west side of the Berry Islands is so shallow in places that random things are sticking out, like tractors. There are also a few sunken planes visible in the shallows.
The water on the ocean side was my idea of perfect – smooth as glass. It’s not great for sailing but there’s no chance of me getting sick. We raised the sails for a while but it didn’t do much.
Hoffman’s Cay is an area surrounded by lots of small cays. We had to wind our way through them to be in the center of the basin.
We quickly took our dinghy over to the beach where we thought the trail to the blue hole was. We tied our line to a rock and took the narrow path through the brush.
Hoffman’s Cay is deserted. There are no large mammals on the island, either. This means that the curly-tailed lizards are pretty unafraid of people.
The blue hole was… Not very blue. We could have jumped in but it wasn’t really clear exactly how we could get out since it was about 25 feet down from the rim.
We headed back to explore the beaches around us.
We were lucky enough to meet up with some boat buddies from Five Pirates. Jayme went spearfishing and caught a trigger fish and a hog fish. He and his wife, Morgan, shared them with us. Nothing tastes as amazing as fish that was swimming about an hour before it was eaten.
We watched the sun set behind Fowl Cay and we’re awed by all the stars we saw when it was dark. There was no light pollution in this anchorage and the moon wasn’t out yet.
We’re going to head to Nassau in the morning. We don’t necessarily want to explore the hustle of that island, but we’ll be able to reprovision and possibly get someone to look at our electrical system/alternator. At least we’ll be able to go to a hardware store.
There’s also a forecast for a lot of wind in the next few days. It’s a good time to be at a dock and not trying to get into an anchorage on the lee side of the wind.
Life on Lailia 