Leaving Norman's Cay

We woke up and had a quick breakfast then proceeded to strap the boat down and put everything away to set sail. We pull up our anchor and left around 8:40am while the Hungarian family left earlier. We decided to wait longer to leave so the sun would be higher in the sky and allow us to see the coral heads and rocks more easily in the water. There was enough wind to allow us to not even turn on the engine to leave our anchorage, which is a first for us. The wind inevitably changed into our noses and we had to beat into the wind so we decided to turn on the engine and ended up running it for about 3 hours and when we got close to Warderick Wells we turned off the engine to only use the sails to get into our anchorage. When we got to a specified anchorage we noticed that they put moorings right where we were planning to throw down our anchor. We put down our anchor right in front of the mooring field and then noticed that there was a small bay that we could really get tucked into so we pulled up our anchor and moved into the area. We were quite happy with the anchorage and Pete & Lesley on Moxie came by to apologize for anchoring so close to us before and didn't mean to scare us away, but after chatting with them a few minutes we had a white guy come by on his power boat and tell us we couldn't anchor there because it was “marked as a no anchor zone”. We looked around and didn't see where we had crossed into the mooring field, but the guy said that those vertical standing buoys marked the “line”. We explained to the guy it wasn't well marked because we were outside of the 90 degree box the buoys made and was therefore technically not in the mooring field. He tried to tell us it was well marked and JR corrected him on where another buoy was needed to properly mark the area. So we picked up our anchor again and returned to our original anchorage where it is was more bouncy due to the southern winds that weren't predicted. Third times the charm. We finally got settled and jumped into the warm waters to get slightly cooler and before long the Hungarian family came to meet us and anchored next to us. This area has a sandy bottom, which is good holding and we are happy to sit through the weather here. Warderick Wells is also the location for the Exuma Land & Sea Park (the world's first marine park), which has lots of trails on land and good snorkeling sites. I was surprised at how large the island was when we arrived. We hope the wind will shift to the east (like it was predicted to do for a week) so we will be more stable on the boat and have much more protection with the land blocking most of the wind to allow us to have flat waters. Fingers crossed. We had chili with macaroni for dinner and watch a movie. Then we went to bed and it was rolling all night but not too bad.