Our take off from Georgetown was a bit later in the morning since we had to stow the deck and raise the dinghy onto the front before we could head out. After our goodbyes we raised anchor at around 10am and headed for the North Channel Rocks exit. We had about an hour before hitting the cut so we figured we could do our waypoints while underway. We plugged everything into our handheld and were doing good until the handheld dropped to the cockpit floor and instantly died. In a bit of a panic, since we were near the cut and had no waypoints anymore, we turned the boat around and motored back towards Georgetown as we re-entered our waypoints into a secondary GPS/chartplotter. After that we turned the boat back around and made our way safely out the cut and off we were.
The trip towards Long Island was uneventful, large rollers and little wind coming from the West. We managed to get the mainsail out for a bit of the trip, but most of it was done under motor. As we approached Long Island the rollers quickened and grew a larger. Our plan had been to stop in Calabash bay for the night but when we got there we realized that there was absolutely no coverage and no way we would get any rest through the night if we anchored there. We carefully manoeuvered through the coral heads and decided that with the winds coming from the west we should just use them and keep going to Rum cay. Turning the boat around and heading for Rum meant another hour rolling back and forth until we reached the tip of Long Island, and unfortunately that was a bit too much for Ellia’s stomach. The wee thing had her first bought of sea sickness. We cleaned up and kept going.
The sail to Rum was nice and we were all very happy with our decision to have kept moving. We approached the island around 12:30 and since we had never been to Rum before, and all the charts warn about coral heads and reefs, we decided to anchor out in the bay rather than trying to get close to the marina. It was a little more stressful anchoring in the dark not knowing what the bottom looked like, but we were in deep enough water that there was no real worry. We dropped anchor, set an anchor alarm, and called it a night.
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