Day 128: A Short Hop

Hope Town to Great Guana, Abacos, Bahamas (anchored)

May 23, 2022

The Elbow Reef lighthouse is the only remaining manned lighhouse in the world that has not been electrified. The lighthouse keeper hand-winds the mechanism that rotates lens and the light is fueled by kerosene. I can’t imagine what this lighthouse has seen since it was built in 1863.

I was really happy to spend some time with a curly-tail lizard who was posing for my camera. These lizards are around 7 inches long and meatier than the green anoles that are so common in South Carolina. Their tails curl when they run.

Since we are very aware how shallow the water can be around here, we knew we had to wait until the tide was nearly high before we left this harbor. We decided to do a short jump of about 14 miles to meet up with some of our boat friends at Great Guana Cay. Since high tide was a bit after 3:00 PM, we had time to spend in Hope Town.

We found the trail to the beach on the east side of the island. The views look like something from a postcard.

Hope Town has an almost New England feel with the lighthouse guarding the harbor.

There are a lot of boats in this very busy harbor. There are water taxis crossing pretty frequently. There are also a surprising number of sea turtles swimming around. I was trying to photograph a turtle from our stern and it kept diving and surfacing out of the frame of the camera and the I noticed that there were actually three turtles, taking turns popping us and looking around.

After motoring out of the harbor, we raised the headsail and turned off the motor. We were averaging about 4 knots in the light wind but it’s really peaceful without the engine sound. The mainsail didn’t want to unfurl all the way but we had it out for a while, too.

The Garmin and the boat apps give us a lot of information when we are traveling but we also use some visual cues. Turquoise blue water generally means depths of at least 10 feet with a sand bottom. Dark black shapes under the surface can mean rocks. Some dark blue can mean really deep water (like the blue velvet we saw on deep crossings) while other dark blue usually means at least 15 feet of depth and a grassy bottom. It’s pretty cool to see the contrast between sand and grass!

Tonight us an early-ish night for us so we have energy for tomorrow (and especially since we were socializing really late last night).

Tomorrow Nicki and Eric from SV Wild will join us here in this anchorage with Casey and Andy (and their greyhound Frank) from SV Luna. We are hoping to do some snorkeling and exploring Great Guana. If all goes as planned (and we know how plans go), the three boats will do a few more short hops together in the next few days.