First Days in Eleuthera 

We were up at 5:00am to begin our passage from the Abacos to Eleuthera. We had a lot of miles to cover so we needed to get an early start. On the other hand, we were leaving through the Little Harbour cut and we needed enough light to evaluate the conditions as we started through the cut. The cut ended up being tame as we motor sailed out into the Atlantic Ocean to watch the sunrise. 

Soon we had decent wind for sailing and the motor was turned off and the sails got to do some work. We left the Abacos as the 4th of about 10 boats and along the way we were eventually passed by the other 6. We don’t feel too bad about this since all of the other boats were at least 6′ longer than Noodin. We got onto the Eleuthera banks and found our way to the very protected anchorage at Royal Island where we caught up with the rest of the crew. The only direction where we lacked protection was to the south which allowed us this open water view. 

From Royal Island we headed for Meeks Patch which is an uninhabited cay just south of Spanish Wells. We snorkeled a bit and ran into some little surprises on the beach. Gotta say I wasn’t a fan of these little mooches. 

We were treated to yet another glorious sunset. 

Today was onto the southern part of the banks which required a trip through current cut. This is a narrow channel that has extremely strong current, up to 10 knots. There are no tide or current tables to let you know precisely when slack current is but we gave it our best shot and only had about 1.5 knots against us. The picture below shows the entrance but we were too busy going through to get any more. Look up “current cut Eleuthera “for more pictures and explanation. 

From there, it was onto our anchorage near the glass window bridge which is another thing for you to look up on Google. We’ll explore the bridge on shore tomorrow and see what else we can find.