Day 188, Friday December 27th,

Day 188, Friday December 27^th, A Beautiful Sail Complete with Dolphins

We are up early as we want to get an early start on the 55 Nm run down to Eleuthera.  Turns out we are not the only ones up early.  Even though we are underway by 7:00 we are the 3^rd last sailboat leaving the anchorage.  We transit the cut out of the Sea of Abaco and are once again back in the Atlantic. 

Sunrise at Lanyard Cay

The wind is predicted to be under 10 knots for the day and just aft of our port beam, giving us enough reasons to hoist our asymmetrical spinnaker.  We spend the day with sail up and average over 6.5 knots for the trip.  The highlight of the passage is when a school of dolphins join us to surf in the bow wave for about 10 mins.  Ross goes up to the bow and gets some great movie clips with his phone.  Once we figure the dolphins are we put a line out hoping to catch a fish.  Ross spots a school of flying fish being chased by dorados, and actually sees a dorado jump with mouth open after the flying fish.   Dorados is one of the main game fish here.  Just after sighting we get a hit on the line unfortunately we don’t get the hook set and actually lose the lure pulling it in.

By 16:30 we are in the Eleuthera island back in Royal Harbour, this is the anchorage that we first landing at when we arrived in the Bahamas from the US.   We have learned a lot since then, and are surprised to learn that it has been 6 weeks since we were last here.  We head over to an Australian flagged sail boat who we had anchored next to.  We had been told to watch for an Austrailia boat called Henry by the crew of Cool Runnings, unfortunately or fortunately we had the wrong boat. They did however know Henry and expected him to anchor shortly with us, the fortunate part is they offered us a beer.  During our visit Ross had been out for a run around Royal Harbour with us to pick him up at 16:30, our beer was done just in time and when we were en-route to get Ross we spotted him at the dock, a different one to the one we had dropped him off at.  Turns out that he had been told by a security guard to vacate the property.

We have an early night after a quick game of cribbage.
Cheers
Dawson and Julie