Week 16 and 17; Feb 23 –Mar 8
We’re still in George Town in the Exumas. This is the upside of not having a schedule. If you’re having fun somewhere, you can stay as long as you want.
Jennifer is loving it in George Town. Afternoons on Volley Ball Beach playing with other boat kids are becoming routine now compared to other activities. In the last 2 weeks she met Marah (12) and Cassidy (9) on Los Gatoews and had 2 sleepovers on their boat. She went with them to a birthday party bonfire on the beach for 2 other cruising kids who turned 12 and to Trivia night where they played on a kids team. The George Town Cruising Regatta is in full swing now with activities for adults and kids. As of this posting Jennifer has been to the Pet Parade and the Talent Show and participated in: - Children’s Day - where the cruising kids had an afternoon of games and activities with the local Bahamian kids and watched the boat parade together, did the limbo, and received a free t-shirt. - Coconut Harvest – 4 kids paddle a dinghy with 4 flippers and try to collect as many coconuts as they can. Jennifer, Marah from Los Gatoews and Brett & Dylan from Dutch Dreamer were a team. With the smallest dinghy and probably the most inexperienced crew (none of them had ever seen this event before) they still managed to stay in their dinghy and collect 31 coconuts and have a lot of fun. - Scavenger Hunt – 4 kids and 1 adult had to go boat to boat and collect the oddest assortment of things you could imagine. How many boats do you know that would routinely carry red mittens, red knee high socks, a red carnation, a red boa, a red wig or red chili pepper lights to name a few? Jennifer’s team came in 1st place in the kids division! Jennifer got the halfway point in the 6th grade curriculum we are using, so we celebrated with a couple of short school days, a hike across Stocking Island to walk on the ocean side and by letting her go to an art class with other cruisers one morning. But I guess that’s really only minor fun compared to other things she’s been doing lately. Please don’t feel sorry for Jennifer thinking she’s isolated and bored on a small boat with limited interaction with other kids. In George Town she’s getting far more social interaction than she would have had at home and loving every minute of it.
We went to Volley Ball beach to watch the cruiser's talent show and the pet parade. The animals were dressed to kill and the talent show acts were a real hoot! Our friends on Los Gotoews performed a history of dance routine with their kids which was a real hit.
In our last update we wrote about Jim dumping the little white dinghy and losing several things. Since then two more items have been recovered. Jennifer’s water bottle complete with pink lemonade was recovered by another boating family with kids. Jennifer’s Croc was found on the other side of the harbor a couple of miles from here. Pretty amazing! But even more amazing than that is that the parents of the woman who found it come from Morris, MN, Linda’s hometown (population ~5000). This really is a small world.
All has not been fun and games. Our engine started burning oil the day we came into George Town. Jim kicked back and relaxed at anchor here for a week before tackling the problem. Then with help from Deaton’s Yacht Service in Oriental, via a phone call, and help from a local mechanic it was clear there was no simple fix. We needed a new engine or at least a new head for the engine. There is no machine shop on the island so if we opted for just rebuilding the head it would have to be shipped to Nassau. After mulling over the options, but we decided the best was to go with a whole new engine, after all it was 25 years old. If we had to have mechanical trouble, at least George Town is a good place to have it. While we were making our final decisions on the engine, Jim happened to be swimming near the boat and noticed that the nuts that hold the propeller on were gone. Thank goodness the prop was still there! They say bad things happen in sets of three. I’m anxious to find the next problem, so we can get that behind us too. Our friends on Dutch Dreamer have already had their set of 3 problems and are still here in George Town waiting for their last part to arrive. Hopefully we’ll get our problems resolved quickly and be ready to move on with them or not too far behind them.
We finally were able to order our new engine after attempting to do a wire transfer for 3 days. The price, even shipping it by air from florida is still more than $1000 les than we could get the engine in Oriental. Fortunately, Deatons Yacht Services pointed us to a distributer in Florida that got things rolling for us. We expect it next Tuesday so we will spend a couple days at the dock removing the old one and installing the new one. Boat services are really slim down here but fortunately Jim has removed and reinstalled the engine twice before so we will do it ourselves. We will be removing many useful parts from the old engine for spares and will probably send the transmission back to Oriental with some folks from there who offered to take it back for us. We should be able to get a pretty good price for it on ebay, if not, we will have a spare transmission also.
We watched the movie “Captain Ron” about the family who inherits an old boat, hires a captain and takes off on the boat in the Caribbean with no sailing experience at all. It’s a hilarious movie, and really not so far fetched. We’ve met all kinds of people who quit their jobs, sold their homes, bought boats and set off to cruise the Caribbean with virtually no sailing experience. They’re learning as they go and doing surprisingly well. Despite the success stories we’ve heard, we are glad that we knew our boat ahead of time and had as much experience on the water as we do.
Week 15; Feb 14 –Feb 22 Georgetown on Great Exuma Island – good anchorages, plenty of services, lots of kids, lots to do. We’re having fun here, so we’ll stay for awhile, at least a week and maybe two. Georgetown is on Great Exuma Island, It’s a cute little Bahamian town with 2 fully stocked grocery stores, restaurants, banks, laundramats and just about anything else a cruiser might need. Pricey, but this is the Bahamas. Most of the boats are on the other side of Elizabeth Harbor on Stocking Island. Jim says this is like a combination of Cape Lookout and Ocracoke (2 of our favorite places to sail in NC) – plenty of room to anchor with a lot of other boats and still feel like you’ve got your own space and a cute little town to enjoy if you need food, ice, or just want to eat out for a change.
Jennifer is loving it here. There are lots of other boat kids and they all meet on Volley Ball Beach every day around 2pm. If school work isn’t done by then, you don’t get to go, so there’s some good motivation to focus on school and get it all done in the morning. Out of the mixed group of cruising kids here now, there are at least 4 girls in the 11-13 year range. Other than just hanging out together, there are some great rope swings, that seem to be a real hit, and volley ball. The adults usually take over the courts though.
Volley Ball Beach is a real hangout for the cruising adults too. It’s a wide sandy beach with a snack bar, picnic tables, lots of beach chairs and a bunch of volley ball courts. It’s kind of like a beach resort for the white folks on boats. About the only Bahamian people you’ll see there are the few that run the Chat ‘n Chill, the snack bar. It’s got a totally different atmosphere than the city of Georgetown. I’d say at least a hundred people meet there every day for volley ball, bridge, dominoes, art classes, yoga, basket weaving and more. There’s even Beach Church on Sunday. Most of the time we just hang out and visit with other adult cruisers while Jennifer plays with the kids. Linda is enjoying the ice cold Diet Cokes with a cup of ice besides!
As always, we are running into good people we’ve met in other ports along the way. Our friend Mark from Natie M. was here earlier in the week and shared a meal of mahimahi with us on OPUS. He brought fresh sweet corn to contribute to the meal. What a treat!. Now we’re anchored next to the Van Wycks on Dutch Dreamer, out of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada. We’d met them in Nassau, where Jennifer played in the pool with their two boys Brett and Dylan. Greg and Carol bought a large steal hull sail boat in Charleston and are fixing it up as they go. We’re enjoying their company, sense of humor and sense of adventure.
We celebrated valentines day on in town and on the boat. Believe it or not, Jim found a valentine heart for the girls in town! What a surprise. We had a picnic lunch in town at the park and then finished up our mahimahi for dinner. Usually Jim makes shrimp scampi for dinner that day, but the fish was fantastic.
We turned the Tinker (our combination lifeboat, sailing dinghy, and motor dinghy) into a sailboat for a couple of days and then into a “gofast” dinghy after we removed the sailing rig. With our 2hp Honda it really doesn’t go fast, but it is a lot more stable than our ivory soap dinghy.
Speaking of the ivory soap dinghy, Jim managed to dump it while climbing aboard it and lost an oar, one of our cherished tervis tumblers, one each of Linda and Jennifer’s Crocs, (we still have a set but they are two different sizes), and our shell horn. The oar and the tumbler washed up on shore and the folks who found them returned them to us. We are still hoping to find the Crocs. The real loss was the horn. It belonged to Phillip, Jim’s nephew and we have been carrying it around for years. If we had scuba gear we could probably recover it from the bottom. Oh well, maybe Davey Jones will find a use for it.
Week 14; Feb 4 –Feb 13We left Exuma park and sailed to Staniel Cay. Staniel Cay is known for the grotto that was used in the filming of the James Bond movie Thunderball. You can swim into the grotto from either side during low tide and there are several large holes in the top that allow sunlight to stream in. It’s a neat setting with a lot of colorful coral and fish. It’s been cool and very windy, so we didn’t spend a lot of time in the water snorkeling there. The town of Staniel has the typical pastel colors of other Bahamian towns. The two small grocery stores in town are simply called The Pink Store and The Blue Store. The lady who makes bread lives in a yellow house, but her sign just says “Bread”, not ‘The Yellow Store’. It had been a couple weeks since we stayed at a marina, so we were looking forward to a night at the dock with electricity, internet and hot showers, but the Staniel Cay Yacht Club didn’t have showers, so we filled up our water tanks for $0.40 per gallon and moved on.
The next stop was Black Point on Guana Cay. Ever since we got to Bimini, people have been raving about the laundry mat in Black Point, so we had to go check it out and it was well past time to do laundry. Ok, it was clean, with new machines, enough machines that you didn’t have to wait in line. It had a good book swap, a little grocery, they sold snacks and the lady that ran it even cut hair. It was kind of a meeting place for cruisers, but I think we all had more fun at Scorpios bar and restaurant. We had our first meal out in a couple of weeks – cracked conch burgers and fries – and it was reasonable even by American standards. This was by no means “fast food”, no one is in a hurry here. It was probably a 2 hour meal. About 15 minutes after we ordered we heard pounding in the kitchen. They were tenderizing the conch before they marinated it and deep fried it. We weren’t in a hurry though, we were visiting with our friend Mark from Natie M.. He’d been to the Junkanoo in Little Farmers Cay since we cut down trees with him in Exuma Park and he’d even had the chance to crew on one of the Bahamian boats in the race. Scorpios had a Happy Hour that same night so we went back visited with cruisers we’d met in other places. We met a family with 3 kids and a Westie. That was enough incentive for Jennifer to get school work done in record time the next day just so she could go visit them. Jim scoped out the 45 – 55 boat in the harbor and found a fishing boat that he’d seen at Staniel Cay – a conch fishing boat! He dinghied on over to visit with them and came back with 14 frozen conch. We’ve been enjoying Jim’s pan fried conch for the last couple of nights. Can’t seem to get enough of this stuff.
The weather warmed up and the winds died down some, so we moved on to Cave Cay. We were anchored in lovely setting by noon and had the whole afternoon to relax and soak up sun and swim. We haven’t had a warm calm day in a while.
The next day we headed for Georgetown along with a parade of about 40 other boats. It was the first good traveling day in awhile. Part way there, we got a call from our friends on Biscayne Bay. Jennifer has been hoping to see them since she met Anastasia in No Name Harbor in Florida. No luck today though. They were heading N and we were heading S. We could see them and the girls talked on the radio, but that was as close as we got. Jennifer was disappointed, but her disappointment was soon replaced by excitement as Jim caught a big beautiful mahimahi – big enough he had to bring it in with the gaff. These fish are almost golden in color when you bring them in and the color soon fades as they die. They sure are good tasting fish though! Large servings of mahimahi for supper tonight on Opus and probably tomorrow night too!