Bye bye tropics

After rounding Cape Santa Maria at the north end of Long Island it was a beam reach to the North Channel Rocks which starts the east entrance to Georgetown. We went through there before in 2003 but were once again stunned by the beauty of the channel that features rocks and reefs set into a thousand different shades of Blue. It’s even better than the postcards show.

With our arrival in Georgetown we passed the Tropic of Cancer and with today’s passage to Cat Island we moved further North and have clearly left the tropics. With the plans we’re making it may be a couple of years before we get back to the tropics.

The passage to Fernandez Bay on Cat Island was 50 nautical miles and centered around two big thunderstorms that came close to us. We managed to outrun both of them but in hindsight we should have left Georgetown via the East entrance, the same way we arrived. This would have kept us further away from the first thunderstorm and eased our wind angle.
The wind was light at 10 knots and we started off on a good beam reach, doing 6-7 knots. But the thunderstorms blocked the wind and turned it more to the north so that at times we had 2-5 knot winds on a close reach which stalled us and we had to motorsail part of the way.

Next trip is to a staging point for the passage to Eleuthera and we really want to use Half Moon Bay on Little San Salvador for that. There are two issues with this and the important one is the current south east wind direction, for which this bay doesn’t offer much protection. The weather forecast shows the wind turning east tomorrow night but we don’t have enough faith in weather forecasts to count on that and may wait a day to see if that actually happens.
The second issue is that Carnival cruise ships have made this bay into their paradise dream island which limits our anchorage to the less protected west side of the bay and they unload thousands of obnoxious passengers turning the beach and the bay into what we imagine a horror scene of screaming people on jet skis or jumping on the beach and coming to us for selfies or ignorant questions, remarks etc. Such hardships dot the life of sailors but we persist:-)