Happy Birthday Dean! We left Green Turtle Cay today. Following our friends on “Amel” we were heading out of the channel during low tide… They supposedly have a 6 foot draft, so when we followed them out the channel we didn’t think twice about running aground, we have a 5.5 foot draft… SURPRISE! We ran aground. Couldn’t get unstuck, so I took the dinghy and ran a halyard from the top of the mast to the dinghy and did my best to pull the boat over to get enough room under the keel to move… To no avail. Just when I’d decided that I’d have to wait a couple of hours for the tide to come in, a local dive boat was getting ready to pass, I gave him hand signals that we were stuck in the channel and to go around, and thought “maybe he can generate enough wake to allow us to move”, so I made LARGE SWEEPING gestures… The captain understood and made a close pass at modest speed, but we were still stuck. He turned around and tried a couple more times, still stuck… I’d given up on this when he turned around and made a high speed pass about 6 feet off the starboard side of the boat and suddenly we were FREE! We then had an uneventful channel passage.
After that, we had a great day of sailing and arrived at Marsh Harbor, the third biggest town in the Bahamas and the biggest town in the Abacos. Here there’s better/cheaper grocery shopping and parts shopping than we’re likely to find for quite some time. Dean’s been craving pizza for days now, so we decided to go ashore and try and find pizza. We went to a marine supply and asked the gentleman behind the counter, who gave us a somewhat puzzled look, and gave us directions to a pizza restaurant… SO, off we go. We walked several miles before giving up on the quest for pizza, headed back to the boat and had freeze-dried lasagna and amazing peanut butter fudge.