Eleuthera Island a wide open bight to the south-west however there is a sandbank that stretches across almost the entire area requiring you cross in deeper water at the southern end, or go around the end of the bank far to the north. If we had taken the overnight, single leg approach, we would have crossed at the south. However from the north end of the Exumas we needed to cross an area with coral heads and shallow waters to get around the sand banks to the north. The wind was E at 12-15 and the sun was shining brightly making for superb day of sailing. The first couple of hours were simple straight line sailing, then we arrived at the area of the coral heads. Fortunately on a sunny day like this they stand out as black patches against the bright aqua blue of the water around them so picking your way through them is easy as long as you keep an eye out. The only tricky bit is that there were some clouds and their shadows look a lot like patches of coral. By keeping an eye out, and checking the sky, you have enough warning to know whether the dark patch is cloud or coral. At their densest the spacing between these coral patches was 50 to 100 yards, so with small adjustments to the autopilot we passed easily through them. We contemplated stopping to snorkel one of the patches but thought it better to keep moving.
After getting past the coral patches there is a small cay in the middle of the northern end of the sand banks. Since we didn't stop to snorkel the coral patches en route, we had time to go investigate this lone cay - Finely Cay. We couldn't get Juno much closer than 2 miles from the cay but by now the wind had dropped to nearly zero so we anchored her in the surrounding deep sand in 7 feet of water, loaded up the dinghy including our small drone, and headed to Finely Cay.
Finely is only 800 x 200 yards so exploring it was quick. There is a pretty sandy beach on the SW side so we landed the dingy there and wandered up and down the short beach to see if there were any paths to the other side. Not finding any we decided to try our drone. Where is all the drone footage from this trip you ask? Well, our little Tello drone doesn't have a lot of power so we have been waiting for a calm day to fly it. It doesn't have a GPS but instead uses its camera to visually track where it is. The range is also limited so it can't get too far from the device controlling it on the ground. Harry set it up and connected it to the iPad and up it went. We could get a better look at the cay and then sent it out a bit over the water to get a picture of us on the beach. Then the control app "Vision Positioning Unavailable, Land as soon as possible." popped up. Uh-oh. The video tells the story. Needless to say we did recover it undamaged as we have the video.
After that excitement, we took the dingy for a circumnavigation of Finely Cay. Not finding much interesting to snorkel or explore elsewhere we headed back to Juno. The winds were still very light and forecast to remain so until well into tomorrow so instead of continuing on to Eleuthera proper, we decided to spend the night, more or less, in the middle of the ocean. We went for a swim and took the opportunity to give Juno's hull a long overdue scrubbing to remove accumulated growth. We had not made this a priority so now the job was much bigger. Without SCUBA, doing the job with mask and snorkel one tires pretty quickly. We both gave it a good effort and committed to continuing the job at future anchorages when the seas were calm.
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