A new spot for us in the Exumas

We spent the 9th hanging out in Big Major for the day, and Patrick made friends with this nurse shark that was mighty curious about him while he was cleaning the bottom of the boat. I don’t think he’s ever cleaned the bottom faster.

The next day, Patrick started the engine as we readied the boat to leave Big Major, and while it was running in neutral and we were down below closing hatches, he asked me to go up and give it more throttle, which was an unusual request. I tried to give it more throttle, but nothing happened, and in fact, it seemed to lose more. With Patrick investigating down below and me turning the engine on and off up in the cockpit, the culprit was finally located. Patrick had put some anti-growth treatment into the fuel tanks the day before (for keeping algae and bacteria out of the fuel), and it seems that must have killed whatever was in our tanks. That seemed to have turned into a long rubbery tube that had somehow attached itself to the bottom of the banjo bolt at the top of the fuel intake, and was blocking fuel from getting into the engine. Thankfully, though, the way it attached to the bolt also blocked all that nastiness from getting through and into the racor filter, so we didn’t have to replace the racor. Just had to get that gunk detached from the intake, then pray for mojo and no more sludge.

It was more impressive before the diesel rags soaked up a lot of the sludge, but trust me, this junk came out looking like a foot long tube of rubber.

We fired her up one more time, and all seemed well, so we thought good thoughts and got on our way. We passed some megayachts on our way out.

The big boat in the middle is owned by the owner of Harbor Freight.

We motorsailed with our jib up most of the way north to Compass Cay, but furled her up as we got close to the anchorage.

The anchorage was a narrow channel along the island, and we actually wound up anchoring three times before we were happy with the depth and our swinging distance from the shallows we could see on either side of the channel. Sometimes that’s just what you’ve got to do. We knew the wind was going to pick up overnight, so we didn’t want to take any chances that we could swing into a shallow spot. Even if it was soft sand…we don’t need to be polishing the bottom of the keel! We did wind up in a beautiful place, as you can see in our featured photo up above.