Anchoring at Great Sale Cay (20-21 January)

Great Sale Cay provides the first decent anchorage after crossing the Bank. So, there we anchored. The island is shaped like an inverted“Y” with one leg of the “Y” extending down about two miles or so. The anchorage is in the crotch of the letter. On the outside of the short leg is a beautiful white beach.



Sunset at Great Sale Cay

 I must say that while we have some rough spots to work on, we deployed our anchor pretty well. I would give us a good C+. You will recall that since our %^&%$^&% old windlass had given humankind a few problems. At West Palm it yielded to one of man’s most sophisticated technological inventions: a sledge hammer. We now have a brand new Maxwell 1500 that can pick up 1500 pounds. We also bought a new anchor. I wanted to test our old 45 lb CQR anchor on our shakedown cruise. But since we didn’t have that chance, we decided to get a new anchor anyway. So we got a 66 pound Bruce. It is a big anchor and we are feeling more and more confident with every night it doesn’t drag. Moreover, my plan on using two 25foot lines as our snubbers worked pretty well. Snubbers fill two purposes. You connect them to the chain, then tie them to the boat in such a way that they take pressure off the windlass – and believe me now that we have one that works we are babying our windlass. There will be no pressure on OUR Maxwell!!! Second, the snubber cushions what might otherwise be a “snap” from wind gusts that drive the boat back until our chain stops the movement rather suddenly. Since they are made of nylon, our snubber stretches about 16% and eases the impact of the wind gust.


Note the perfect relationship between the snubbers and the anchor chain.
Yea, yea, yea, note also the beautiful environs

Anyway, the weather at Great Sale Cay was so beautiful. Since neither of us had ever been to a deserted island in the Bahamas, we decided to stay an additional day. Great Sale Cay is an uninhabited island that does not have much to commend it to humans, except the wonderful anchorage and the nice – though not pristine –beach around the corner. Before we did anything, of course, we had to deploy our dinghy. Well, we got her half way down and, as you might have guessed, the winch ceased working. We could raise the dinghy, but could not lower her. So we raised he back up and put her above her davit (but we could not lower her into the davit) and tried to diagnose the problem. Luckily, John from Vulcan came over and spotted a break in the wire. Even after he fixed that, however, the winch still didn’t work. I determined that the problem was the switch. Between John and me, we figured out how to open up the switch and clean the contacts.

That was it! The winch worked! We were back in business and began our explorations. We followed the crotch of the anchorage around until we found a place to go ashore. When we did, we found that other humans had preceded us – and had left their refuse. Still, we learned that this particular island was made mostly of dead coral and mangroves. I tried to get over to the other side of the island, but the going was pretty tough and I never quite made it. We did, however, discover a skull!!! I am not sure what kind of animal it was, but since we did not see any signs of fresh water or any other signs of a mammal on the island, we think it was probably brought to the cay like everything else and left by some ghoulish humans. You know if you were looking for a story to write, you could probably not do much better than a serial killer on a deserted island in the Bahamas … I am just saying.


Mike out exploring in the deal coral and scrub at Great Sale Cay

 Speaking of discovery, I also found out something about our dinghy – it goes like hell! I had never had it down in a place where no one cared how fast you went, so when I opened up that 30HP puppy, I discovered why it ran so rough at low RPM – it wants to MOVE. I zipped around the anchorage a few times, then went back to the boat where Ann and I redeployed the dinghy in preparation for traveling the next day.

 ANN’S NOTES: Anchors, snubbers, windlasses OH MY…I am just the anchor girl that has to use all these things with help from my fearless captain. We are still very much in the learning curve. At the end of this adventure I will have arms like Michelle Obama J While we were exploring around the island we saw several sea turtles..those little guys swim fast. I do not explore very well..too many bugs that love to bite me..while I was waiting for Michael ,I broke a branch on a dead tree..inside was a large colony of ants..little white eggs and all. The ants moved every one of those eggs out of the sun. How clever nature is ..a dead tree that keeps them protected from the sun and away from lizards that like to eat them. If one just slows down and observes what is around them you can learn a lot. I want to thank our boat buddy for helping us out with the windlass switch..it would have been a nightmare traveling with a swinging Boston Whaler on our fly bridge.