Publish Date: Sunday, January 25, 2009
Location: Rum Cay, Bahamas
Elizabeth Harbour in Georgetown (at the south end of the Exumas) is a
beautiful and special place for cruisers. Every winter, hundreds of
cruising boats arrive in the harbour and create a temporary, transient
community in the warm, protected anchorages of Elizabeth Harbour. On the
east shore is “chat ‘n’ chill beach”, where cruisers congregate daily to
play volleyball, walk on the beach, tell fish stories, down a Kalik or
two, and generally hang out. Every morning at 7am there is a community
cruisers net on the VHF radio, and every Sunday there is “beach church”
at chat ‘n’ chill beach. Georgetown itself, on the west short of
Elizabeth Harbour, is a bustling settlement with grocery stores, marine
outfitters, beauty salons, gas stations, an airport, Internet
connectivity, and small hotels. You can see the steady stream of dingys
zipping across the harbour every day to do some provisioning or fulfill
some other need that Georgetown can meet. The whole thing is quite a
phenomenon, and it would be easy to stay there all winter, and many
people do.
For many cruisers Georgetown is the terminus of their cruising goals,
and they stay there all winter before heading back to the U.S. in the
spring. For us and others, however, Georgetown is a temporary place to
stop and re-provision before setting out for other destinations. It is
for this group of cruisers that Georgetown has become known as “chicken
harbour”. When you leave Georgetown, you are entering a patch of
cruising ground known as “the thorny patch” because of the weather and
the seas. You’re also exiting the relative safety and ease of cruising
on the Bahama Bank, and heading out into the Atlantic Ocean. Georgetown
is such a relaxing and pleasant place to spend time, and the cruising
beyond can be so taxing, that some people have a hard time moving on. I
met one gentleman who said he stopped in Georgetown for a week twelve
years ago, and he’s still there!
Yesterday we made our escape from chicken harbour, cruising to Rum Cay,
Bahamas, which is about 50 miles from our anchorage in Elizabeth
Harbour. And while that doesn’t seem like very far, it includes about 25
miles in the open ocean when crossing from the northern tip of Long
Island to Rum Cay. This meant we had to keep a close eye on the weather
for the several days before our departure, and choose our weather window
wisely. A couple months ago we would not even have known what to look
for, but this week we felt pretty confident that we could predict the
conditions and make a safe passage. We were rewarded with relatively
calm seas, and a beautiful cruise. We still have a lot to learn about
the weather, and how to predict the seas that it will produce, but our
current skills at least allowed us to escape chicken harbour!