Highbourne Cay To Warderick Wells

We’ve gotten a lot of destination suggestions from a lot of people and Warderick Wells has been one of the most commonly mentioned.  There are a few dozen mooring balls in two fields, the north mooring field and the Emerald Rock field, that can accommodate vessels of all sizes.  While you can certainly simply hail the park upon your approach in hopes that they will have a ball available for you, the procedure for getting on their list is to hail them on VHF 09 the day before your intended arrival.  Then at 9am each morning they are on channel 9 confirming departures, assigning balls to those who have made requests as well as taking requests for the following day.  Because we were out of radio range the prior day, Carolyn in the office at Highbourne Cay Marina was able to message the park warden for us to make our request.  Another thing to do if you are out of range is to ask by radio that someone closer relay your mooring request.  We heard this happen several times and happily relayed for people when we were able to.  We had been told by everyone to request the north mooring field which only has a few balls that can accommodate a vessel our size.  Once we were within radio range as we made our way down we hailed the park and learned that there wasn’t a spot available for us on the north side but that we could have any ball of our choosing at Emerald Rock.  We were prepared for that possibility and had plotted routes into each location as they’re reached from different approaches.  Nicola and Cheri who manage all of the VHF communications are incredibly lovely, patient and comprehensive with their instructions.

With only a few other boats in the Emerald Rock field, we essentially had our pick of mooring balls.  The proper procedure to moor here is to run two separate lines through the loop on the mooring and tie them back to your bow cleats.  This evenly distributes the tension on the lines allowing your boat to remain more settled and in the event one line should break you do not come loose from the mooring.  The moorings are well-maintained and although there are no pennants with which to pick them up you should have no problem using a boat hook.

When we were in Highbourne we ran into a very nice couple who was also next to us in Nassau.  They run Volaré, an Absolute 58 that’s part of a yacht share program and were heading in the same direction as us with their next stop also being Warderick Wells.  After we checked in at Warderick they came by OLOH on their dinghy to say hello and we invited them over for cocktail hour where we had a terrific time getting to know each other.  After they departed the next day we got clearance from the park office to make our way to the north mooring field to take their mooring.  Although the fields are actually very close “as the crow flies” it is about a seven-mile route from where we were to where we were going.

There was an unusual amount of activity in the park on this particular day as there was a Poker Run with about fifty boats hopping from island to island throughout the day, picking up playing cards and hoping to win a big prize.  They were supposed to have cleared out of the park by the time we were pulling in to the north mooring field with its very narrow channel that can be a bit tricky to navigate.  Just after we entered the field we were hailed by Nicola in the office who told us that the poker run boats were blocking a part of the channel we needed to pass through to get to our mooring and that we needed to turn around and take a mooring just outside of the entrance until the boats left.  Terrific.  It was blowing at around 15 mph and there’s not a whole lot of room to maneuver (be sure to see the video below).  But we successfully spun around and our soon-to-be neighbors on the Tollycraft C-Shel who were caught in the same situation just behind us were kind enough stand-off so we could pass by in the narrow space.