Fire On The Beach, Fire In The Sky

The last cruising event of the sailing club's season was a bonfire held down at Tahiti Beach on the south end of Elbow Cay. About 20 people showed up after it had postponed a day to let the firewood  dry out after that torrential rain. We took Walkabout there with Ken and Noah, plus two other friends of ours, Marcia and Barry. We had to anchor off the beach and wade in, and the event was planned so that we started at low tide and as the tide rose, our boats would be in deeper water and eventually the water would put the fire out.

Marcia had her Capris on so Dave helped her get to shore. Needless to say, other members were quite jealous!

Group shot...Dave and I are in the center with me in pink, of course.

The sunset was spectacular!

The fire was super hot with the kindling and pallets that were brought down, and it burned quite quickly.

Marshmallows and hot dogs cooked fast too.

When it came time to leave, the north wind had picked up and we decided to take it slow, since the moon was not up yet and it was pitch black out. Check out the map below. We were headed to the flashing sea buoy off of White Sound (where the southern arrow ends), because there is a shoal we had to avoid. For some reason, we missed it or it wasn't lit, and we ended up going further out into the Sea of Abaco to the next flashing white light. That's when we couldn't figure out why the floating buoy was up so high, when we realized that it was on a pole. We figured we had missed White Sound and we were at the southern end of the Parrot Cays (the island chain above the Elbow Cay lettering)and we needed to go closer to shore. As we headed closer to the lights of the houses on Elbow Cay, I picked up another strange flashing light that was bright blue this time. As I tried to get my night vision I kept seeing a dark spot of land to our left that shouldn't have been there. Thank goodness we were only traveling at 8 knots. It suddenly came to us that the other white light was actually Porgie Rock (the dot on the map below the E in Elbow Cay lettering) and the blue light was the end of Parrot Cays. All these lights are just privately maintained lights that may or may not work and you don't notice them during the day. Boy, were we disoriented, especially with all the anchored boats close to land, that we had to maneuver around and blended in with the shore lights. What was really strange was as we were going along we kept seeing what looked like a lighthouse replica flashing to our right on land in White Sound. Why would someone do that to mess up navigation? It couldn't be the real lighthouse, because it was in the wrong spot. No, WE were in the wrong spot! We sure had a laugh about it when we finally made it back to Hope Town Harbour. Another couple in their boat had followed us the whole way, because they weren't sure where they were going either. I guess we weren't the right people to follow, but at least if we had gotten trouble someone would have been there to help..."the blind leading the blind?" We now joke about how we were all headed to Treasure Cay in the northern Abacos if we had kept going. 

Next time we take a GPS with us!