Great Sale Cay

5/6/21

After a leisurely start this morning we continued on to Great Sale Cay.  This is one of the few decent stopping points on the Little Bahama Bank, the shallow sea area north of Grand Bahama Island.  It is possible to anchor almost anyplace on the bank, but for safety reasons one needs to keep lots of lights on all night so passing boats can see you.  We normally burn a single anchor light at night when we are anchored, but doing so out in the open calls for more lights.

We passed a few small islands today, none of which are inhabited.  This is a remote part of the Bahamas, and we are not getting any cell phone signal.  There really isn’t much out here.  I got a photo of one of the small islands we passed, shown below.

Great Sale Cay is another uninhabited and unremarkable island.  It has some mangrove swamp areas, a few small scrub trees, and not much else.  There is good anchor holding in sand, and there is decent wave protection from the east and north but no protection from the west.  There is a photo of the island shown below.

During the night a thunderstorm came up and wind and waves came from the west.  That is the unprotected direction in this spot.  The thunderstorm had a good light show and we heard a little thunder, but there weren’t any lightning strikes near us that we were aware of.  After the storm passed the waves became stronger from the west, and we spent the night with the boat pitching up and down.  Cruisers call this ‘hobby horsing’ after the hobby horse toys we all had as kids.  It was a restless night, and we were ready to get going the next day to find a more peaceful anchorage. 

About a year ago we replaced our anchor and chain with a much bigger model and after a night like this we are very thankful we did so.  The new anchor didn’t move an inch.