Thunderball Grotto

Honestly, Staniel Cay has been our favorite area in the Bahamas. It is so popular with tourists that they offer all the amenities you would like to have, while still being small enough that you feel isolated in paradise when anchored. There is also cell phone coverage here which makes accessing the internet possible while at anchor here. 

Right next to Staniel Cay is the Thunderball Grotto, named so as it was the location for the underwater fight scene for the James Bond movie Thunderball. 

The grotto is a beautiful cavern inside where the limestone has eroded away to create this huge cavern with an open skylight in the center. The best part about the grotto is actually what can be found beneath the surface. 

The grotto is teeming with large fish that will swim right up to you as you swim. At the surface, large stripped fish will come right up to your hands and mask, but if you dive down, larger fish will be skirting along the bottom!

The grotto is best visited at low tide, and at slack water. At low tide, the ceiling is farther away, allowing you to snorkel without hitting your head. At slack water, there is less of a current ripping through which makes the entire experience easier to navigate. 

We visited the grotto our first time at low tide and with a slight current. It was really fun and we spent a few hours swimming around this small area. It might seem like you could see it all in a few minutes, but the truth is every time you revisit a spot, something new will be swimming there. 

We returned for our second grotto experience at high tide, and the current was a bit stronger. The rocks were closer to our heads and the current was very strong. We swam around for a little while but it wasn't as enjoyable. 

If you visit the grotto, be sure to visit it at low tide and when the current is lighter,; you will have a magical time in there! 

Bermuda

​Hello! We are anchored in Bermuda in St. George, on the north end of the island. If you would like to meet up, please email us at riggingdr@gmail.com

We would love to meet the local readers of the blog!​

Iguanas on Allen's Cay

The Bahamas are a magical place, each little island is an entirely different world from the last island you visited! On some islands,  

One of the most northern islands in the Exumas is called Allen's Cay and is home to a population of iguanas. These iguanas live on the vegetation found locally on the island, but they are very willing to take handouts from local tourists that come to see them. 

While we were on the island, Maddie was able to get some incredible pictures of the iguanas as they came out of the native plants and scampered along the beach! 

After a while, some rather big iguanas came out to see what food was being handed out and puffed up to show off to the smaller iguanas.  

He made his body very large and began strutting around the beach trying to scare off smaller iguanas that were around. Maddie insisted on tossing the food towards the smaller iguanas instead of directly feeding the big iguana. 

The smaller iguanas would grab the lettuce and run away when the big iguana would come over to challenge them. Sometimes, the iguanas would drop their lettuce and the big iguana would take over the situation and chow down on the leafy goodness as the smaller iguanas watched. 

After beating to windward for days, arriving on this magical island where random iguanas greet you on the beach as you make landfall was quite the experience!  

Crew and Personal Effects

When you have crew join you for a period of time, they will surely bring their personal effects with them. Inevitably they will forget something when they leave the boat and return home or onto their next adventure. 

What do you do with their personal belongings that they left on your boat? Do you use them? Do you throw them away? Are you responsible for the items? What if you see them again? 

In short, anything that is left on the boat when they leave is now yours to deal with. You can choose to send it to them, use it, discard it, or sell it; the choice is yours. 

If you see them again, you are not obligated to give them their items back, nor are you obligated to give them cash value for their item.

Hustlers (people who try to squeeze money out of other people) will be the only people who will cause you trouble in this situation. If they leave something and you are never planning on seeing them again, why should you carry their stuff around indefinitely in the hopes that you might, by chance, meet again? 

When they see you in an anchorage, they will approach you and ask you for their belongings. When you tell them that you don't have it anymore, they will begin to make a scene and try to make you feel very uncomfortable. Then they will offer you a solution to your discomfort that will make everything "seem okay": Money. 

The hustler will offer you to pay them for their personal items that they left on your boat that you discarded. You don't have their items anymore, so you can't give them back, but you need your money to cruise longer and pay for things on and around the boat. The hustler doesn't care about you, they merely want your money because this is how they operate. 

To quell the situation, all you need to do is recite the following: 

"You abandoned the item. I salvaged the item. When you departed, our relationship ended and I owe you nothing."

If the hustler tries to talk to another member on the boat and guilts them into agreeing on a price or the payment of money, they will bring up that discussion now.  

"But your wife said that you guys would give me money for it." 

This is when you get to play the Captain Card! 

"I am the captain, my word is the word of the boat. I didn't make any arrangements so no arrangements have been made." 

At this point, they will become angry, irate, and even rude! There is no good in continuing the conversation as they won't stop until they get what they want and you aren't going to give them what they want.  This is when you say:

"We're done here. There is nothing more to discuss." 

They won't like this fact, but this is how the system works and they can't fight it. If they won't leave, you can always call the police to have them dealt with, but usually they will leave at this point. 

Losing Tooth III

Tooth III is a Livingston 7.5. This is a hard dinghy with a catamaran hull. They are very stable boats and very useful boats. They are a bit wet when motoring or rowing into a seaway, as they have relatively low freeboard so any splash or spray will come right in and soak everyone, but they certainly are a good dinghy. 

We were anchored off of Nassau when we decided our next destination would be Allen's Cay in the Exumas. This destination was only 37 miles away from us, but it was upwind. The winds were forecasted to be 20-25 knots for the next several weeks, so we figured that there was no point in waiting for better weather since it wasn't going to change for a while. We were also told that on the flats of the Bahamas, the waves "are like waves in the ICW, the water is too shallow for them to develop so they won't be more than a few feet." 

With that in mind, we set out it make the windward trek towards Allen's Cay, and we decided that we would tow Tooth III since we were going to be sailing over shallow flats. The idea was that if we ran aground, we would need to row out a kedge anchor, and to do that we would need Tooth III in the water. Since the seas would be relatively calm, we figured we would just tow him along. 

Well, the seas were not calm and it is much deeper than charted. Everywhere on the flats, Conch Spit, Yellow Bank, and White Bank is around 15-20 feet deep. We sailed over waters charted as 5.7 feet and had 8 feet under the keel. We draw 6.5, so the water there was 14.5 feet! 

Not only was the water deeper, the seas were much higher than in the ICW! We were beating in to 6+ foot waves, and poor Tooth III was being dragged through all of this. Spray would slowly make its way into his hull and I would have to heave to, pull him up to us, and bail him out. When he was empty, he sat higher and kept most of the water out. As he filled, he would sit lower and then waves would actually break into him, filling him much more quickly. 

At one point, we tacked and then looked back to make sure Tooth III was doing ok, but he wasn't there! We pulled the painter in and when we got to the end, the line had snapped. Poor Tooth III had quietly stayed behind, probably swamped and sank to the bottom, if not awash with the seas. We turned around and began searching for him, but it was futile. The strong winds made every whitecap around us look like him, and if he were awash, we would never see him in the seas. We searched for an hour, but sadly had to call it off and return on our voyage, without Tooth III.

Tooth III was a very good dinghy, and we promptly began searching for a replacement Livingston 7.5 dinghy, but so far have not found one yet. 

This experience taught us a valuable lesson that we hope you can learn from without going through it yourself. It turns out that losing a dinghy is very common and it is especially common when towing. Painters break quietly and uneventfully, leaving your dinghy behind as you work your way forward.

The lessened learned is never tow your dinghy over long distances. If you tow, look back at your dinghy every 10 minutes to make sure it is still there. Have multiple painters attaching to multiple points on it.  

When we tow Sophia, our inflatable dinghy, we have a massive painter tied to her bow. A stern line tied to the painter with a rolling hitch (should the attachment point at the bow fail) and a second painter tied through the oar lock (so if the primary painter fails, Sophia would be towed sideways until we notice it and rectify the situation.).  

Ideally, always carry your dinghy in davits or on your deck, where they are out of the water and in view of you as you are sailing. If you must tow, have redundancy in your towing system so that should anything fail, you will still have your dinghy in tow.