Palm Cay, New Providence Island

We left Soldier Cay on Wednesday morning, planning on a short trip over to Hoffman Cay for one more night before heading south to New Providence.  As we motored toward open water, we saw eight sailboats already out there, heading south.  The wind was perfect for sailing, so we raised the sails once we cleared the cay.  It turned out that at least three of the boats out that morning were ones we'd met in Great Harbour Cay and we chatted briefly on the VHF with one of them.  Since the direction (on the nose) and strength (light) of the winds on the next day would not be favorable for sailing, and this day was just about perfect for it, we decided to keep on going to New Providence instead of stopping at Hoffman Cay.  We were crossing deep ocean water in the Northeast Providence Channel, so we put the hand lines out hoping for mahi and tuna and settled in for the 45 nm day sail.  Unfortunately, no fish came our way, but the freezer was still full of king mackerel, so it was probably for the best.

We arrived at Palm Cay Marina in the late afternoon, and almost as soon as we were docked, we all headed to the pool to cool off and enjoy the sunset.  The marina has a beach bar, where Big H made us delicious cocktails all weekend, and a restaurant that has a wood-fired pizza oven.  Pizza is only available on the weekends, and we made sure to take advantage of it.  The crust was delicious - it was just as good as Pizzeria Toro in Durham!  

During our five days at Palm Cay, we swam, ran errands, held boat school, had pizza and cocktails, did work work, and boat work.  On Saturday we rented a car for the day to explore the island and do some holiday shopping.  Kendall was looking for Bahamas-made crafts s0 we stopped at the Craft Cottage in Nassau.  We all enjoyed seeing the locally-created and beautiful items and wished we had more room on the boat to bring some with us!  Nadine (the owner) was warm and helpful and treated us like we'd been friends for years.  The girls have been collecting shells and have expressed interest in making jewelry with them.  We mentioned this to Nadine and she directed us to a small jewelry-making supply store where we found exactly what we needed.  After a stop at a mall for more gifts, we were all starving, so we had lunch on the waterfront in Nassau.  Up next was the grocery store to make sure we were stocked up before heading down to the less-populated Exumas.  We are leaving this morning and planning for landfall at Ship Channel Cay in the northern Exumas.  

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