18 to 30 April 2024

Pau Pau Bay, Eleuthera to Governor’s Harbour, 25° 11′ 70″ N, 76° 14′ 87″ W, 6nm, 1 hour

to Glass Window, 25° 25′ 07″ N, 76° 35′ 55″ W, 23nm, 4 hours 30 minutes

to Egg Island, 25° 29′ 68″ N, 76° 53’20” W, 20nm, 4 hours

to Old Bahama Bay, Grand Bahama, 26° 42′ 03″ N, 78° 59′ 47″ W, 135nm, 25 hours

We were a little (read a lot) weary of all the constant moving on, either to escape the weird Bahamian swell or just needing to take every weather window to keep ahead of the hurricanes. But arriving on Eleuthera, we were doing well timewise and, having filled the fridge with beautiful fresh fruit and veg from the farm, we didn’t urgently need to move again.

So we sailed just a few miles to the beautiful Governor’s Harbour, put the anchor down and settled in for a week’s holiday.

Really only a relatively tiny place, this was the biggest metropolis we had found yet in the Bahamas. It had a library, four churches (Anglican, Catholic, Methodist and Baptist), a couple of gift shops, a few cafés and restaurants and a fish fry. But it was still Bahamian sleepy with very few people in its sandy streets.

Importantly, it also had two decent sized grocery stores and a bakery – more than enough to keep us going. After so long without a decent shop the choice was in fact a little bit overwhelming!

Getting ashore at Governor’s Harbour was a unique experience. The water was too shallow to take the dinghy to the beach so we had to anchor it quite far out and wade in. I’d never got my feet wet taking the rubbish out before!

Eleuthera is a very long, thin island. At Governor’s Harbour it is only 2 kilometres across the island to the ocean side so we took a walk. Pretty pink and yellow flowers were reflected in the colour of the buildings as we walked up the gentle hill

and down again to the Atlantic.

French Leave Beach is famous for its pinkish beach and, although the Bahamas had already spoiled us with its beaches, this one was the highlight.

Just back from the beach we found the ruins of a Club Med resort abandoned in 1999, having been destroyed by Hurricane Floyd.

We spent a lazy week in Governor’s Harbour, just enjoying a rest and pottering amongst all the colonial style homes and learning a little bit about the town’s importance as the home of the first Bahamian parliament in 1746.

Despite pineapples being the island’s major export and it hosting an annual four day pineapple festival, other than in representations, we found not a single fresh pineapple. It didn’t stop me buying a new sweatshirt bearing one though.

We watched the comings and goings of the mail boat and other commercial boats in the harbour including this delivery of sand. We were somewhat bemused about sand arriving on this sand island!

We finally dragged the anchor out of Governor’s Harbour after a week and sailed up to the north of the island and the curious landmark of Glass Window. The island narrows to a strip of land only just wide enough for a road with a section where you can see right through to the Atlantic on the other side.

As with most places in the Bahamas there wasn’t really anywhere to go but the beach. We enjoyed cruising on the dinghy along Gouldings Cay Beach and Twin Sisters Beach.

We took a walk along the long Twin Sisters Beach and found one of them perhaps! At the very far end we found an area with inviting hammocks amongst the trees but a polite private sign told us to keep out. We thought nothing of it until we got chatting to a local who told us that rock star, Lenny Kravitz has a place off the beach and was in fact there at the time. His band were staying in the house on the rocks at the other end of the beach. They had been jamming together on the beach just the night before!

Now, I have a complicated relationship with Lenny Kravitz. I love his music but I haven’t quite forgiven him for that time when I went to see him in 1992 and he walked off stage in Birmingham in a huff after just one song. So I was hoping I might bump into him on that beach and he might apologise for his impetuous behavious. But it wasn’t to be. We saw no sign of him in our couple of days in his backyard. It seems, though, that he might have chilled out a bit since then as he spends his time tending his organic vegetable garden and looking at this view.

The time had come for us to think about leaving the Bahamas and making the hop to the United States. Trouble was, navigating ourselves out of the north end of Eleuthera was going to be a challenge. We had two options for getting through the reefs. The first meant extra miles to Fleming Channel, an open but shallow passage. The second was the notorious Current Cut.

Both required careful consideration of the tides which was a bit tricky because the tide tables were for miles away in Nassau so there was a lot of guesswork. Named because of its turbulent current as the tide rips through the narrow channel, Current Cut, was the most direct route but reading about it turned us cold. Get it wrong and at best we would run aground, at worst we would get caught in 10 knots of tide. We figured we’d survived the Messina Strait so we’d take this one on too. On the AIS we watched several boats make a safe passage through and from the timing of their transit extrapolated a favourable tide on our chosen day.

At our alloted time, we left Gouldings Cay. Two other boats left just ahead of us and we could see others coming in the same direction from further south so we were confident we had our timings worked out well. Our next anxiety was the sand bar at the entrance to the Cut. It was very shallow but at high tide we should just make it over it. As luck would have it, the boat ahead of us was a couple we had met on the beach so we radioed them and asked them to let us know what the depths were like. We watched them enter and shortly after, they called to tell us the depths were fine.

Almost indiscernible in the low island ahead we could gradually see the narrow gap appear. We got safely across the entrance and into the deeper water of the Cut itself. We had timed it perfectly with only a hint of tide with us and made it out the other side unscathed. No raging torrent, just a picturesque canal that took us out to the north of the island. We continued to tiny Egg Island and spent the night anchored off the beach preparing ourselves for a 24 hour passage to Grand Bahama, our jumping off point for the States.

After a straightforward passage, we arrived at the very open anchorage at West End on Grand Bahama at 10am. A significant enough swell was creeping in to make us consider our options. There was a very shallow anchorage around the tip which we could probably squeeze into at high tide and find the deeper spot but it was inhabited solely by catamarans with much shallower drafts so we thought better of it. Three miles back there was an anchorage in the canals of an abandoned housing development. It had great protection but a very recent report told of a robbery at gunpoint so we didn’t fancy that either. We called the marina and they had space, just at a cost! We decided to go in anyway and treat ourselves to our first nights tied up to land since Guadaloupe – a little bit of luxury to close out our Caribbean chapter.

And it really was quite a luxury. OK, the rickety wooden pontoons reminded us of the dodgy restaurant pontoons of Turkey and we had sharks as neighbours but to just be able to step ashore without getting wet feet felt like luxury enough.

Add to that, the surrounding resort with pretty low-rise blocks with equally pretty names, like Bougainvillea and Oleander. Amongst its palm trees there was a pool, a gym and a private beach which, even in our short time there, we made full use of. Hard as it may be to believe, we don’t actually spend a lot of time relaxing on the beach or by a pool but to have access to shark free water to swim in and areas to lounge was so welcome.

We had the most relaxing day, reflecting on how far we had come since crossing the Atlantic in January and looking forward to everything the States had in store. It was the perfect way to close the chapter of our Caribbean adventures…