The Exumas are beautiful. We’re in Staniel Cay, Exumas, Bahamas. We arrived in the late afternoon, the day before yesterday. Our weather forecast suggested we stay put, which we were happy to do; Staniel Cay is a very nice place.

Here are a few pictures of what we’ve seen since leaving Rose Island.

Rose Island to Staniel Cay, via Hiborne Cay (14-Dec to 17 Dec 2012)

Our destination December 14th was Hiborne Cay.

We navigated what is supposed to be a very difficult channel (but didn’t know at the time it was supposed to be difficult), and had no problems. The anchorage was surgy-rolly, so not a great sleep.

The next day we had a very brisk sail about 40 miles south to Staniel Cay over the Exuma Banks.

There were times we were doing 7.8 knots over ground, which is fast for us. They say when two boats are sailing in the same direction, it always turns into a race. We’re not competitive at all, but we were going pretty fast. We were on a broad reach, and a big catamaran had a hard time catching up to us (we normally get smoked by big cats on that point of sail). When he did catch up, he gave us a very enthusiastic thumbs up.

We were anchored by about 5:30 pm (we had to try three times to get settled, which is unusual for us – there is a lot of current around here).

The anchorage was a bit tight, so we were close to what we named “The Hungry Rocks”. They seemed to make a slurping sound as the tide came up; “Hmmmm…big fat sailboat…haven’t had one of those in a while…“.

We had a nice calm (not rolly) night, and we slept well. The next day, we lowered the dinghy off the deck, and went ashore to explore a bit.

Here are a few pictures of what we saw in Staniel Cay.

An hour or so before high tide (which is at 11 am here), we’re going to go out into Exuma Sound to start our first long offshore passage. We’re planning to get to Mayaguana by early Wednesday sometime. The weather is supposed to be perfect for ocean newbies like us…very mild conditions…okay Dad? Really, it’s going to be an easy passage, but if we get out there and it isn’t, we’ll low-tail it to the closest port.

We’ll try to SPOT every four or five hours (and at our waypoints so you can get an idea of our actual route if you’re interested), but we’ll be incommunicado otherwise, until at least Wednesday. If our weather report looks good Wednesday morning, we may even keep going the extra 60 miles to the Turks & Caicos. We’ll see.

Hope all’s well at home – we miss everyone!