Green Turtle Cay

We left Crab Cay early morning again with only 3-4 knots of wind coming directly behind us.  We could only gain 1/2 -1 knot of speed so we ended up motor-sailing the 16 miles to Green Turtle Cay.  We anchored right in the bay, dropped the dingy and headed into town.  Small, pastel homes and shops is all this town is made of.  The streets are just big enough for a golf cart and we walked the whole town in 15 minutes.  We stopped at the store and got some bread and headed back to the boat.  The next day we hiked to the south end of the island to look for sand dollars in a sandy bay.  The sun was out and everyone swam all day including Lucy.  The weather is supposed to be windy and overcast the next few days.  We will be trying to get as far south as we can for the next few days.

We spent the night anchored in Green Turtle again and slowly dragged our anchor in heavy winds toward some other boats.  We were up every 1/2 hour checking and by 4:00 the wind changed and we were now blowing the opposite direction.  I got up at 5:45 just to check and noticed another boat was also dragging straight toward us and was about 40 feet from our bow.  I woke everyone up and we pulled up anchor and decided to get moving south.  The winds were 15-20 knots and the water was choppy.  As we were sailing along yesterday I was sitting at the wheel, Dan and Preston were cleaning out the water maker and the depth finder went from 16 feet to 3 feet and was beeping wildly at us.  Then within 5 seconds Dan was outside and had both the sails dropped and we were sitting on a beautiful sand bar!  We put the engines in the water to slowly and painfully inch our way back off the bar as we were being picked up and let back down on the bar by the waves.  As I was trying to figure out why this bar was not on our charts and how big it was to get around it I noticed it was on the charts and it basically took up the whole bay.  DUH.  After we made it around we headed straight for anchor in a small cove just off the privately owned island of Titloo and called it a day as we were all exhausted.

 Sailing wing to wing with the wind directly behind us

 Being smashed onto the sand bar