Current Cut Anchorage

We moved 8 miles over from Royal Island to the anchorage at Current Cut to do a little exploring and to stage for our trip through the "Cut". It was a nice anchorage with a lovely beach and a few homes, most of which were vacant.

Once anchored, we dinghied in to the beach and followed the only road we could find to the little settlement.

Here's a view of Samba from the beach.

 The town was quite small with, supposedly, 130 people in it. We only saw 5.

 One of them was a sweet librarian who was in the process of barcoding all of their books.

The settlement had a library, 1 little blue grocery/variety store and a church. That was pretty much all of it.

 We followed the road a couple of miles out of town to check out the Current Cut and to do some exploring. We stumbled upon an old watchtower that was built in 1974. We think they used it to watch for ships coming to the cut.

 This is the patch back to the beach and Samba.

Once back at the boat, we upped the anchor and decided to go the long way around the cut due to the tides. That didn't work so well. About 30 minutes out, we had engine trouble so we dropped the anchor and Jim went to work. Fortunately, he was able to find and fix a faulty oil sensor. However, by then, it was too late to head to the next anchorage so we turned around and re-anchored at the Current Cut site.

It turned out to be a lovely sunset AND, drum roll please . . .

We were blessed to see a GREEN FLASH just as last of the sun hit the water! Woo Hoo! That is only about the 5th time in our lives we have seen one. Though we weren't able to get a picture of it, it was truly amazing.

Tomorrow, the dreaded Current Cut!

Narrow, 50 feet deep and very rapid with currents getting as high as 10 knots as the tides funnel a whole lot of water through this tiny opening. The bad thing is that there is no margin for error as the sides are either rock or shoaled sand 1 to 2 feet deep. Ughhh.

Stay tuned!