We had a glorious sail nearly 40 miles up to Highborn Cay, it's one of the few islands in this area we can get quite close to the, shore, with SE winds the swell still got into the anchorage a bit but it wasn’t bad. We spent a few days here,, we went ashore and tried to find a path to walk over to the other side but it was too overgrown so we gave up and just had a beach walk.  

 

 

As we're heading north I am trying to get as much snorkelling in as possible so went for a snorkel and then did a bit of hull cleaning, we have 3 remoras hanging out under the boat here, one big, one medium and a small one, they weren’t interested in what I was doing and stayed on the other side of the boat. 

We popped over to our nearest neighbour, a Swiss boat Seren Wen and invited Matthias and Corrine over to ours for Sundowners. 

They are on a 1 season Atlantic circuit and are heading back to Europe from the Bahamas end April / early May, they were cleaning their hull and Matthias had noticed their cutlass bearing which holds the propeller shaft in place was missing or at least part of it was. We had a lovely evening with them and agreed to go over the following to see if we could see exactly what the problem was. Armed with my dive torch and an endoscopic camera we went over and Matthias went in to take pictures - 🫣 I thought the endoscopic camera was waterproof but it lasted about 5 milliseconds before it stopped working 😳, plan B Corrine got their go pro and tried again, from this it was clear the rubber part of the bearing was totally missing and the propeller had a fair bit of movement in it which they urgently need to sort before they make an Altaltic crossing or indeed use the engine for any length of time. Anyway they appreciated our input and made a plan to get lifted on Eluthera - luckily they have a spare bearing on board.