I’ve had the good luck to have sailed in many of the world’s best cruising grounds and I discovered long ago the pleasures of exploring the less frequented anchorages and remotest islands. To do this, you often need to navigate through reefs, sand bars and miles of shallows. And that requires a boat with shallow draft, like the Seaward pictured above. When we bought our last cruising boat, a Jeanneau 45.2, we intentionally looked for a boat with a very shallow draft and the Jeanneau had a wing keel that draws only five feet. The reason for this was our two favorite cruising grounds are Nantucket Sound and the Exumas in the Bahamas.
Around Nantucket Sound there are dozens of coves, anchorages, harbors and gunkholes that are too shallow for boats with more than five feet of draft. But it is in these special spots that you can often anchor with just one or two other boats around you and where you can often see osprey fishing and deer browsing the shoreline at dusk and dawn. You may be in one of the most crowded sailing areas in America but you’d never know it.
In the Exumas in the Bahamas, there are hundreds of anchorages from Allen’s Cay all the way down to Stocking Island and George Town where you can tuck yourself in close to the beach and enjoy wonderful snorkeling and walks ashore with the iguanas and local birds. And even though there are hundreds of cruising boats in the Exumas every winter, with a shallow draft cruising boat you can always get away from the madding crowd if you want to. To us, that is what thin water cruising is all about.
