No Travel
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| Early Morning and a Storms a Brewing! |
I managed through extreme perseverance to upload all the pictures for the posts without them from 4/8 to 4/11. After I got those up to date, I managed to upload full blog entries for 4/12 thru 4/16. With an impossibly slow, but free, WiFi, I succeeded in getting caught up, but it took the entire day and well into the night with a couple of breaks along the way to get the job done. I hope not to get that far behind again, but only time and WiFi availability will tell.
While I focused on blog updates during the morning, Clark worked on trip planning and weather studies. All his investigation culminated in a decision to stay in this marina for an additional night due to unfavorable conditions for crossing to the Abacos from here on Wednesday as hoped. With seas predicted at around six feet, I am glad we are waiting at least one additional day. Though a prediction of four foot waves for the following day still does not sound very inviting.
Since I had no where to go in a hurry, I decided to take a break from blogging and wash out a few items of clothing by hand. At a cost of $0.50 per gallon of water, I had no intention of washing them on board the boat. I had noted that the sinks in the restrooms were exceedingly deep with a drain plug. I decided that I could wash the items there.
What I had not remembered was that the water faucet is one that is controlled by a motion sensor and only runs for a very short period of time. I concluded that filling the sink basin could well take a life time. Nevertheless, I persevered and managed to collect enough water to do the job. Since I felt somewhat uncomfortable doing my laundry in the public restroom, I decided to use the individual restroom associated with a shower and hoped that no one queued up to use the shower while I was busy in there.
Washing even a small load of wash by hand is no picnic. Ultimately I am not sure how clean it got through my efforts; however, it is clean enough for the Bahamas! I dragged the bag of wet laundry back to Sea Moss and proceeded to turn the fully enclosed upper helm into an outdoors clothes dryer. I had socks, under garments, and t-shirts hanging on makeshift clothes lines. I opened up some panels to let air through and hoped they would eventually dry as they were all sopping wet.
I had planned to go back to working on my blog updates after I completed the wash; however, we had surprise visitors Debbie and Dennis from a sailing vessel named XYZZY. Anyone familiar with the old-time computer game Adventure would recognize the significance of the boat name. For those unfortunate souls who never had the opportunity to experience the computer game, Dennis has an explanation of sorts on his boat card.
"Long, long ago there once was a computer game called Colossal Cave, which could take you to mysterious and fantastical places. But "XYZZY" was the magic word that could transport you from the adventure home again, and back into your adventure again!"
Dennis and Debbie saw Rumson, NJ as our hailing port on the stern of Sea Moss and wanted to introduce themselves since Dennis grew up in Rumson. We immediately had a lot to talk about, but most of it centered around boating and not around Rumson. I talked to Debbie at length, and Clark fell into conversation with Dennis.
Debbie departed to go unpack as they had just returned from a trip home. However, Clark talked to Dennis first over on or by his boat and then on ours. Weather, places we have seen in the Bahamas, and places we should go all seem to be popular topics of conversation among boaters here. Since many boaters are in a holding pattern until a weather window opens up for them to move (us included), weather gets discussed a lot.
For a while the conversation centered around the ICW up the east coast of the U.S. Dennis explained what we might expect to see or encounter in Georgia including Savannah. He said that the Dismal Swamp is beautiful but, no surprise here, buggy and told us that we need to take a conch shell with us to give to the lock tender there as he collects them. (Too bad I left that big one on the beach!) I found the conversation very interesting and tried to take some mental notes for our planned time there.
At 6:00 Dennis and Clark still sat on our sofa happily chatting away when suddenly Dennis announced that he should leave because Debbie would wonder where he had gotten to. When Clark started to grab the line we have to pull the boat in closer to the dock for easier on / off, Dennis said, "Don't bother" and then proceeded to leap across the large gap from the boat to the dock. As he did so, both feet flew the air until one hit the dock on the other side. Given that earlier, due to the height differential between the boat gunwale and the dock, I had crawled off the boat onto my knees as the only way to get on the dock, my mouth hung open in admiration. All I could say was, "Wow!" He just smiled.
Before he left, the conversation turned once more to how soon we thought we could leave the dock here for our next destination. The owner of the sailing vessel docked next to us joined the conversation since he is also headed to the Abacos next. So, even though he was no longer on the boat, it took another half hour for Dennis to depart.
He left in a hurry when he did, however, as a sudden rain storm showed up. Bahama rain seems to be totally unpredictable and arbitrary in how much comes down when a storm cloud does show up. Black ominous clouds may produce three drips of rain, and an almost clear sky can turn into a torrential downpour within moments. Since, as Forrest Gump would say, "It's like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get." Dennis took off in a hurry expecting the worst. We got the three drips version, but since I needed to cook dinner it was fine that he had departed.
While I was busy putting something together for dinner, Clark noticed the sun setting and took off to get his sunset picture of the day.
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| Sunset at Spanish Wells Yacht Haven in the Eleutheras, Bahamas! |
After dinner I continued to work on the uploading of pictures to the blog entries. While I worked on my blog updates, Clark scanned the TV for digital or analog channels available over the air - he found none. He then scanned the FM radio and found one station playing gospel music since, after all, it was still Sunday. We listened to that for a while as it started out well, but it did not take long for us to decide that we preferred Clark's mp3 player playlist to the radio station's selection of music.
I finally declared myself done with blogging somewhere around 11:00 and went to bed.
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