Day Three:

"Here's today's plan," said Tom over coffee on Easter Sunday morning, a beautiful sunrise bathing the anchorage in golden glow.  "We'll go have our beach walk, but we'll be back by 11 and head out to Lee Stocking Island."  We had gone to bed with some suspense, Tom changing the plan every couple of hours. But we had also gone to bed without yet seeing let alone walking our beloved Atlantic-side beach, the one we had walked daily the previous June. I was not leaving without at least one dose.

I'll have to add photos later.  Though we came with a new waterproof camera, I'd failed to unpack it, thus saving you, dear reader, u.w. BEFORE photographs of Quantum Leaps gnarly bottom.  So a quick walk was had in the high tide soft sand, before we returned to the boat and dropped the mooring line.

With much more confidence than he had come into Exumas the year before, Tom steered Quantum Leap out the channel and cut into the open water.  We had a pretty good breeze blowing and we crew hustled about setting the main, genoa and staysail.  Incredibly, all the hurricane storage preparation had been unwound without serious gaffs, so everything went up and out smoothly.  QL took off like a race horse too long left in the stable!  What a glorious sail!

Lee Stocking Island, not to be confused with Stocking Island where we started from, is about 25 miles north up the Exumas island chain.

I have had quite a hard time getting my head around the idea of the Bahamas.  They don't look anything like any place else we have sailed.  We are used to stand alone islands surrounded by deep water, but the Bahamas, particularly the Exuma chain,  are strings of narrow islands with deep water on one side and very shallow waters on the other "inside".  You either pick your way very carefully along the inside or you go outside and sail free, as we did.  The closest thing we have experienced previously are the atolls of the Pacific.  But atolls are generally circular and confined and the Bahamas are not.

In what seemed like no time, we were bringing in the sails and entering the pass.  Tom and Bette had been up this way with their family in the weeks after we left last summer, so Tom felt pretty comfortable with the approach.  We anchored off a shut-down marine research facility with a handful of other cruising boat and settled in for our first relaxed afternoon as cruisers.