This pretty Island has been very popular with cruisers because it allows the passage between Cat Island and Eleuthera Island as two day sails instead of spending a night at sea. That all changed when Carnival Corporation (cruise lines incl. Holland America Lines are owned by them) bought the island and renamed it to Half Moon Cay and kept cruisers away from their cruise ship operations and beach resort (incl. pirate ships, bars, banana floats etc.) Cruisers have to anchor in the north-west corner of the bay which is untenable with a large swell rolling in now (and often). But with no cruise ship around today nor tomorrow (you can check their schedules on-line) they seem to allow us to anchor where we want because we're halfway the bay and heard no objections and we just had a motor yacht pull in even further to the more protected SE side of the bay.
We are now at a latitude further north than Key West so we're making good progress. Tomorrow morning we're leaving early for a daysail to Rock Sound Harbour on Eleuthera which is about 42 nautical miles. This is one of the anchorages with almost all around protection that we want to check out. It'll be a long day tomorrow because we'll be in the lee of Eleuthera for a while, then have to navigate through a channel zig-zagging through shifting sand bars and then the last 9 miles seems to be straight upwind to the anchorage so we'll need the iron sail once again.
The picture shows our approach to Little San Salvador today as we went over the drop-off onto the shallow bank. On the right you can see the recording from the depth sounder: very steep!
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