S/V Querencia - A Swirish Sailing Adventure: Monday 15 February – March 03, Little Farmers Cay to Emerald Bay, Great Exuma, 25 miles.

We left Little Farmers Cay at slack tide to reduce the potential “rage” exiting the cut to the Sound. It’s a tricky route out with plenty of coral reef to spoil your day. Thankfully we exited without any dramas thanks to Jorgen’s great driving skills. We sailed southwards in the Exuma Sound, our destination Emerald Bay Marina. Formerly a Four Seasons Resort the marina was acquired by Sandals (upscale resort) and had just reopened. The beauty with this place is that they have cheap rates for the docks without shore power $0.50/ft or $20/days for our 40’ boat (as opposed to a standard rate of maybe $2.50-$3.00/ft in the rest of the Exuma marinas).

In addition to the inexpensive marina fees, Emerald Bay is also a good place to re-provision with a good grocery store and an excellent liquor store which incidentally delivers you beer, wine and whisky directly to the cockpit of your boat – talk about convenient………

We rented a car one day and headed south to Georgetown and collected my box of Swedish Snus that the kind fella Anders Person had sent via UPS, thanks Anders –you saved the cruise! (Thanks Jamie for the UPSing!).

While in Georgetown we attended a weather seminar that was hosted by Chris Parker the weather forecast guru. It was very interesting and educational. Everybody, including Chris, agrees that this has been the windiest winter in memory with more fronts than ever before – go figure; we cruise for one year hit El Nino weather! Oh well, sure beats the office and we hear that Virginia is getting more snow than Vancouver.

The good news according to Chris Parker is that after the blow on Wednesday March 03 we should be returning to more stable, normal weather with less severe and less frequent FRONTS and more of the traditional NE trade winds.

We traveled around the island by car and came across Momas Bakery, just as she was pulling hot bread, coconut pies, chocolate rum cakes and cinnamon rolls out of the oven.
Innisfree and Querencia were stocked up with goodies. We also visited the old Salt Ponds that were harvested for sea salt, back in the day. We stumbled across old Loyalist ruins and crossed the Tropic of Cancer! We headed north to Barretarre and dropped into Big Cheese’s for a couple of rums on the way back to our floating home.

We have been here for 2 ½ weeks now and the plan is to head north to Lee Stocking on Friday March 5th after this current FRONT has passed, Front No. 642. The local beach is fantastic and the only decent place to dine out is Palappas Bar and grill located in the Grand Isles resort, 3 mins walk away. The Marina and Sandals Resort are wrapped by a Greg Norman Signature golf course, which looks extremely difficult. We have walked the course (while no one was golfing), and the room for error is 6” either side of the fairway. A round of golf is $265.00, which does¬ not include club rental, shoes, golf cart, beers, balls etc – ouch.
Another great perk to this Marina is the wonderful club house, laundry and shower facilities included in or 50c rate . So we got to see some of the Winter Olympics and closing ceremony and enjoyed the pool room.

We are looking forward to moving on but have enjoyed our pampered stay at Emerald Bay. Since we have already seen Georgetown twice by car we feel no need to head south and mess with clubheimers.

Sailing south to Great Exuma... Innisfree leading the way...