February 15, 2009.

The anchorage at Goat Island turned out to be very pleasant. Once the hook was down Christy and I did a bit of snorkeling, we had a fabulous Mahi Mahi dinner compliments of BiBi, and turned in for the night.

The plan was to be up and underway by 0630. By some twist of freakish fate I was up early and had all the boat systems checked early. We hoisted the mainsail and sailed off the anchor at around 0615.

It seemed that everyone else was a little worried about making our next anchorage before dark. They all motor sailed off over the horizon while we were content to beam reach along at 6 knots under glorious skies. The wind ended up dying at about 1230 so we were forced to start the engine and motor for the last 4 hours of the day.

Since we’d already checked into the country and nobody really needed fuel there was no reason to go through Nassau. Since we were coming from the north we just head straight to Rose Island. Rose Island is due east of Nassau and boasts a wonderful anchorage along its southern shore.

When entering from the north the approach looks to be a little dicey. There are a string of tiny islets that run from the western tip of the island. You have to take the boat through a specific gap and then turn hard to port and hug the southern shore for a mile and a half until you come to the anchorage. Of course, there are no channel markers or anything crazy like that.

We were hugging the shoreline along the south side of the island and heading towards the anchorage. The charts show 12 feet of water along this route. That meant that we had close to 7 feet of gin clear water under our keel. One minute everything was going along nicely and then there was a horrible snapping sound. It turned out to be the sound of my ass slamming shut when I glanced down at the depth sounder and it said we only had a foot and a half under us. It seems that there’s a hundred yard shallow section that’s not reflected on the charts. We made it into the anchorage just fine and cocktails over on Solitaire were never so welcome. Best of all was that Jay on Far Niente had cleaned his Wahoo and had enough fish to give some to everyone.