Its our last day at White Bay (at least for now), and we are getting ready to head back to the East end of the Islands. Made a quick trip into the Soggy Dollar to connect to Wife and upload some posts. Unfortunately the picture albums I had set up in the posts would not load. Will have to look into that later, since its much easier to just dump the pictures in one bundle into the blog. By the way, if you haven’t noticed, hovering the mouse over the picture will show the caption. I haven’t found a way to have it show the caption permanently below the picture.
Dropped the ball and headed out of the east end of the reef at about 11am. As we round JVD and pass Sandy Cay, the wind and waves are really building. Now its 20+ knots right on the nose and the waves are around 6’. We are on the North side of the islands, and there is very little protection from the open ocean. We are crashing over waves, burying the bow and sending water everywhere, including (due to a small miscommunication) down the forward hatch into our cabin. Delaina and Noah are in the salon watching movies, and of course Noah starts feeling ill. Delaina is unphased, but Noah soon needs the bucket. We end up hugging the shoreline to avoid the biggest waves, but its still slow going into the strong wind.
After about 3 hours of fun, we reach Monkey Point on the south side of Guana Island. We are back in the lee of the islands, and the waves are gone. We tie up to a National Park mooring and jump in for a snorkel. This is one of our best spots yet for snorkeling. Delaina is finally getting the the hang of it and has a great time. There are millions of minnows along the reef and she is swimming right through them. This is what I love about sailing. It was a bit of a challenge getting here, but now the payoff!
After a great snorkel, we head around the point to another White Bay (creative names are not a specialty here). This one is on Guana Island and is just a secluded anchorage. The island is private, with a resort on the beach so we are not supposed to go ashore. There are a couple of huge mega yachts just leaving as we come in. We have two failed attempts at anchoring. The bottom is all rock and the anchor is skipping off and dragging. We finally snag a rock, but its not really safe, a wind shift would pull us off that rock and we would slide until hopefully snagging another one. There is also the risk of the chain wrapping around the rocks and making it difficult to raise the anchor. So we gave up on this site, and headed back around Monkey Point and over to Great Camanoe Island and Lee Bay. This is just a small cove, but according to the guide book has perfect anchoring conditions. There are only 2 other boats in the bay and we settle in behind them in about 20 feet of water. The anchor sets and we are secure for the night. After dinner, we start our first monopoly game – a bit challenging with the wind blowing through the salon.
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