Sailing to Grand Turk

Leaving Cockburn Harbour, South Caicos

By Friday 25 Jan we were beginning to go a little stir-crazy in Cockburn Harbour, South Caicos, even with the previous day’s change of location and fabulous snorkelling.  Happily, when we woke up, reality matched the forecast and the wind had dropped sufficiently for a brisk sail to Grand Turk.  We had feared that we would end up beating the whole way to Grand Turk which would have meant our covering 50nm, perhaps more, but the wind had veered far enough to the south that we only needed to put in one short tack southwards to clear the shallows to the north of the entrance to Cockburn Harbour and from there on, though we were hard on the wind, we didn’t need to tack again.  It made for a much faster passage than we had expected, which was beneficial, not least because we couldn’t leave our anchorage until an hour or so after first light as we needed to wait for sufficient rise of tide to get over the bar.

Top left: Our first glimpse of Grand Turk (marked by the red arrow).  Top right and bottom:  it turned out that the ‘highest point of Grand Turk’ was a cruise ship on the dock!

Grand Turk is about 22nm due east of South Caicos and, like South Caicos, is very low-lying.  About 10nm off Grand Turk, we caught our first glimpse of what we thought was a building or a water tower on the island.  We subsequently realised that it was cruise ship on the cruise ship dock.  We didn’t actually see the island itself for several more miles!

As we closed with the island we looked for the breaks in the off-lying reef so that we could pass through to the shallower, protected water inside.  We had expected the reef to be much more visible, thinking it to be closer to the surface with the seas breaking on it.  However, it is surprisingly deep (though not all over!) which helps to explain the warnings that we had seen on our charts and in our guide book that the anchorage is exposed to the ocean swell.

Sunset across the anchorage behind the reef

We lowered the sails outside the reef and motored cautiously through our chosen break.  The depths come up very quickly – from several hundred metres deep to about 15m in the space of about 50m horizontal distance.  The water was very clear and once we were over the shelf inshore of the reef it was quite unnerving how clearly we could see the bottom despite being in a perfectly safe depth of water.  Our chart warns of coral heads between the break in the reef and the area where we wanted to anchor so I kept a close lookout from the bow and Nicky helmed us in, reassuringly shouting the echo-sounder readings to me to stop me from worrying too much that we might go aground!  We ended up dropping anchor in about 4m in a large sandy area – good holding and plenty of swinging space should it be required.  We took a short wander ashore, primarily to dispose of the rubbish that we had accumulated after 4 nights at anchor off South Caicos, and then settled down to enjoy a spectacular sunset and plan the next day’s diving.

Grand Turk, Turks and Caicos Islands