Exploring Warderick Wells Cay

Thursday 23 Jan, BHS day 24, Warderick Wells Cay: Failed drone flight, climb Boo Boo Hill and tootle in the dinghy.

A good 7 hours sleep last night, while the tide was coming in (aligned to the wind). And by morning the wind has swung and dropped so no more fighting with Cloudy riding over the mooring buoy.
After breakfast we decide to stay another day here and enjoy the place. We will go ashore once the wind dies and the rain showers stop, early afternoon. So we spend the morning editing videos.

At 1pm we go outside and the light on the white sand banks that surround us is amazing. And just moments before we get the cameras out, a large eagle ray jumps clean out the water right next to Cloudy. What a sight! There are 6 of them down there, swimming passed the boat. Such great sea life the Bahamas has.
Once ashore we go to the park office to pay, where we get to meet Nicola in person. She was so very pleasant on the VHF. The mooring buoy is $45 per night. Not cheap but we have no grudge, considering the top quality of the setup here and the excellent way this Exumas Park is managed.

There are nice trails all over the island, and sunbeds and kayaks on the beach to use. Plus, while they don’t have WiFi, they do boost the BTC phone signal from Staniel Cay. So we manage to send family a few messages and check the weather. It finally looks settled for several days. We really could do with not spending half our time finding a place to hide from the next blow, then being wind bound for 1-2 days. This last wind was our 4th heavy blow to hide from since coming to Bahamas just 3 weeks ago. Enough thank you – let’s have a few days of the famous Bahamas blue skies and tranquil conditions, like Google portrays it should be …. like ALL the time 👍

From the office we walk along the pristine white beach then inland onto the trail to Boo Boo Hill. For some reason I have it fixed in my head it’s called BooHoo hill. And after making several jokes – like jumping out from behind a Palm shouting “Boo-Hoo” – Oana finally corrects me! But for me it will now always be Boo-Hoo Hill! I mean, what sort of name is Boo-Boo?

The trail takes us over sharp limestone, across mangroves and up the sandy hill to Boo-Boo. It’s a great view from up the top, looking west down on the anchorage with its light blue water. Then out east to the deeper water, with its big waves hitting the island sending spray in the air. And along the coast there are blow-holes sending spray even higher.
At the summit there is a huge pile of wood, each with a boat name on. Some new and colourful, other weather-beaten and old. There must be thousands of them! We should have come armed with paint and coloured pens to leave Cloudy Bay’s mark there too. But as the pile also resembles a pile of rubbish, I’m not sure we really want to add to it, frankly.

Once back down, we jump in the dinghy for a tootle southwards along the Island. It’s characterized by shallow white sandy bays backed by small palms and dispersed by coral limestone outcrops. All very pleasant to the eye. Unfortunately the sun is playing games with stormy clouds today and we struggle to get nice light for photos. Let’s hope tomorrow is better.

Back on Cloudy we have dinner while taking in our surroundings. We see a large yacht coming in through the narrow mooring channel. It’s probably 70ft long. Looks like just a couple on board. A big boat for 2 people. She tries to pick up the mooring pennant but their bow is just too high for her to lift it up to get their mooring line through. So it’s captain Glen to the rescue! Dinghy is quickly lowered in the water and we manage to help them out. There, our good deed for the day!

In the evening we manage to complete the next video editing. It will just need polishing tomorrow. We are quite pleased with it. Much better than we imagined it would turn out. Oana is so good at this editing now. It’s hard to keep up with her keyboard clicks and mouse movements. With any clip, she manages to reduce its length by up to 50% while still keeping the intended context. It means we end up with a concise 40mins video that is very viewable, compared to a 1hr 20min video that would be slow and boring. But it still takes a lot of work. There are 235 raw clips in this video, then Oana dissects each clip maybe 4-5 times minimum. Meaning the 40mins video comprises over 1000 individual video and audio pieces, all sewn together. A lot of work!

Tomorrow we will try to make another small step southwards, not wanting to miss any of the main delights of the Exumas – which are rapidly going to the top of our list of best cruising grounds. Good night.