Sailboat Discovery: Ragged islands

After the Island rally we hooked up with a couple of boats who planned to head down to the Jumentos and Ragged Island chain. These are remote cays that stretch south west toward Cuba! In fact Duncan Town the only inhabited island is only 50 miles from Cuba and many cruisers use it as a jumping off point for a trip to Cuba! Not many sailboats go this far south because there is no water, no fuel and very little in the way of supplies, our watermaker made this trip possible!

We left Georgetown and travels south to long island and spent the night at Thompson bay, then left early in the morning and crossed from the banks off of long island to the great Bahama bank by way of the comer channel, a 8 mile shallow (8-10 feet) pass. It was dead calm and the water was like a looking glass. We saw a pin cushion star fish every 50 feet or so, it was a spectacular trip!

We arrived at water cay, the northern most cay at around 3 pm and spent the night there. Water cay is know for its number of sharks because the Bahamian fishermen clean their catch there and the sharks see boats and think food, no swimming there!
We then traveled down to raccoon cay and stayed there for 4 days! Lots of great reefs to snorkel lots of sand dollars under the boat, spectacular beach, and those ever present barracudas and sharks. We ended up getting used to swimming with the barracudas, the sharks were another story!
We then traveled down to Hog Cay, it's a beautiful crescent beach just north of Ducan Town. We spent 2 weeks there! More snorkel, lots of conch, and that's where we found over a hundred sea beans!

The cruisers who have been coming for years have built what they called the yacht club, a shade pavilion made from bamboo, palm stocks, and floatsom! Very cool! Everyone leaves a memento behind in the club and we did too, we found a hard hat on the ocean side beach so we put our info on it and added a Texas burgee!

It was a great trip, the ragged's are really special!

Photos below