First stop: Water World

We crossed the Stream on a window which started with a nice westerly but then went light and north as predicted.  Which made things pretty lumpy, even with just 5 kts of N wind against the Stream, enough so that everyone was feeling pretty green at the gills.  I don't want to even think about what a 20+ kt cold front would do.  So we lurched across under one engine and made it to Riding Rocks just at dawn and a slack tide.  Now that we know our way, we will do it again and cross in the dark.  We slide across the banks all day and saw one other boat.  We stopped in the late afternoon, just threw an anchor out in the middle of absolutely nothing.

 

The banks are amazing. No marine feature like it in the rest of the world that I know of. Hundreds of square miles of 15 foot deep water with just sand and some sponges.  It was like Water World - we were anchored in the middle of the Great Bahamas Banks near the Northwest Channel with *nothing* 360o around us but turquoise water. We swam and made dinner, watched the current shift from ebb to flood  (yes there are currents on this massive submerged mesa), saw no boats passing in the night. Then the next morning we set off again, but with the company of several approaching boats all trying to hit the Northwest Channel before the ebb tide current got to warring with the easterly wind there.

We cleared in at Chub (takes literally minutes and they are glad to see you since they have so little to do), fought our way across New Providence Channel into a nasty sea and a building easterly, and are now on our way east around the coast to meet a daughter in Nassau ..  but the memory of Water World will last for the rest of our lives.