Winds were looking nice finally after many days of easterly winds, so we decided to make a big hop over to Spanish Wells. The winds were looking like we might have wind on the beam, but as is often the case, the winds seemed to be close hauled the entire way. It was a bit of a funny sail, as we left at around 8pm to catch slack tide through the cut out of White Cay, and then that gave us the entire night to make our way across the Northwest Providence Channel before cutting into the Eleuthera Islands, about 46 NM straight across. It was a light wind forecast, but light winds are good for us, and when we started out we were going much too fast. We only needed to be averaging about 4 knots for the overnight, so we quickly reduced sail and I put up the gale sail to give us a slower more comfortable ride.
We continued under that sail config for most of the night, and then put up the genoa again in the early morning as the winds started to ease up in the morning. This ended up working well and we came up to Egg Island just after daybreak where you then cross over from 1000+ meters deep to around 4. We've quickly been getting used to these shallow waters, and anything over 10 feet starts to feel very safe.
The crossing was a bit wavy but not to bad. At one point I was relaxing in the cockpit, and noticed a bright flash on the horizon. Then I saw what looked like a giant comet streaking through the sky. It turns out it was a SpaceX launch, which we just happened to catch while I was staring off into space. Pretty neat to see, and not something I expected you could see here, but it makes sense as we aren't really that far away from Florida and Cape Canaveral. Pretty cool, and Aria even spotted the bright flash of what we assume was the second stage separation of the rocket.
And with that we sailed in through Little Egg Island and then up to Spanish Wells. We were intending to maybe take a mooring ball there, but a large ship was docked and blocking the channel in the harbour. So we anchored out, and that ended up being good enough. The wind later shifted around from the north which actually made that a great place to be anchored and so we just stayed put there.
It was New Years Eve and we rowed into town, figured out a place to tie up, and got some provisions and walked around town for a bit. Had lunch at Budda's Snack Shack (we had some nice burgers a real treat), and then retired back to the boat.
We made the crossing with Atlas who were anchored up with us White Cay, and we crossed at the same time. We also met up with our Danish boat friends who were anchored at Egg Island (they had crossed the day before), and they also came and anchored up beside us out front of Spanish Wells.
Sadly that night, Theone and I weren't able to stay awake until New Years. The night crossing, rowing into town, etc, took it's toll and we crashed shortly after 9pm into a deep sleep. We might be starting to show our age...
We'll spend a bit of time here in Spanish Wells. Our main area of concern is getting fresh water right now, and second to that is some fresh produce and provisions. We are doing fine on fresh water so far, but we do need to refill one of our two tanks while we are here. Once we are topped off we'll look at continuing south through the Eleuthera's.
