Dec 23
We went on a walk to town this morning. We have heard a guy on the morning radio net advertising a book he wrote of short stories about Abaco, and I thought it might be a good read. We found the gift store that he said carried it, and after looking through the whole book section twice, I finally found a few copies under some other books. The price was $23, and although it is a "numbered, signed, limited edition", I don't think I need to spend that much on it.
While in the gift shop, we saw a rack with a few CD's on it. One caught my eye, because it was by our friend Eric Stone. They had two of his many CD's there. I sent him an e-mail to tell him I saw them, and found out that he will be playing at Spanish Cay on New Year's Eve. That's where we first checked into The Bahamas three weeks ago.
Across the street from the gift shop is Da Bes Bakery Yet. We had gotten some locally baked bread there and needed more. The last loaf we got was raisin. Today we got a coconut swirl loaf. We have taken to having a light breakfast made from an inch thick slice of the local bread, buttered on both sides, sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, and lightly fried in a pan.
In the evening, we had Gregg from Argonauta over for drinks, dinner. Dinner was another Tupperware surprise casserole, and even though we explained what that meant to Gregg, he acted like he liked it.
GPS N 26-32.806 W 77-03.207 Miles made good this leg 0. Total miles covered 3693.
Dec 24
Christmas Eve. It still doesn't really seem like Christmas to us. We have been listening to the holiday channel on Sirius for over a week now, and we have seen the decorations in the stores, and on some of the boats in the harbor, but when everyday is a holiday, it just doesn't seem to stand out. A lot of the people on boats in the marina have flown home to be with family for the holiday. But, there also seems to be more and more boats arriving over the last few days. I counted thirty-six in at anchor this morning, and there are about twenty in the marina now.
We went to the store this morning, since most everything will be closed tomorrow for Christmas, and Monday for Boxing Day. All we really "needed" was limes for the drinks, and beer. Solomon's, the bigger grocery store, was sold out of limes. They had a huge bin of them a couple days ago. So we went over to Price Right, and they had five big cases of them. We got a few limes and a cheap aluminum pan to roast the turkey in.
We then went to the liquor store and got a lesson in how commerce is different in the islands. There are several liquor stores in town, but the two largest are only a few hundred feet from each other. The one we have gone to twice before sells Kalik beer for $36/case, and has an everyday deal on liquor that if you buy six bottles, mix-and-match, you get a 20% discount. Well, the other store is having a holiday sale, with an add in the paper and a big sign out front that says "buy 2 get 1 free". That would be a 33% discount, so we went there. I assumed that the beer prices would be similar, based on my experience in the States. Well, first off, the "buy 2 get 1 free" deal was not on everything. And you had to buy three of the same thing - no mix and match. So, we got three bottles of Cruzan rum, but the Captain Morgan or Meyers, or Mount Gay, was not on sale. Then as we checked out, I saw the case of beer was $46. So, we saved about $12 on the rum, but the beer cost $10 more than the other store, so the lesson learned was we won't go back to that store.
We asked the store to call us a cab since I didn't want to carry the beer that far. We have now experienced both extremes of taxi experiences. If you recall in NYC, we had a Muslim cabbie who told us we should kill the President. That was the bad end of the spectrum. Today, our cab pulled up in front of the store just a few minutes after they called. The driver was a very nicely dressed local woman and the van itself was relatively new and clean. As we drove the few blocks to the marina, she welcomed us to her island, wished us a Merry Christmas, asked where we were from, and was just all-around friendly. As we disembarked, she got out of the cab, asked us our names, told us hers, and gave us both hugs as she again wished us a pleasant stay in the Abacos. That would be the good end of the spectrum.
GPS N 26-32.806 W 77-03.207 Miles made good this leg 0. Total miles covered 3693.
Dec 25
Christmas dawned cool and gray. The forecast is for rain all day. We got our showers before 09:00, and just as we got back to the boat, it started to rain. As the first squall came through, the wind blew over 30 knots for a few minutes, and then the sky opened. The winds subsided a bit, but the rain continued until late in the afternoon.
We didn't have any plans for today other than dinner. We cooked a five pound Butterball turkey breast, the Mooney Family stuffing, mashed potatoes, and corn. We ate about 15:00, and the meal was excellent.
Other than dinner, our highlight of the day was spent making phone calls. We had a good Internet connection all day, so we used Skype to call family and friends. I figure we spent about three hours on the phone, and it cost about $2.00.
GPS N 26-32.806 W 77-03.207 Miles made good this leg 0. Total miles covered 3693.
Dec 26
During the night, a strong cold front came through. On the morning net, somebody said they clocked a 42 knot gust as it came through. Somehow, I slept through that. I guess since the wind was coming from in front of the boat, the waves were not slapping against the back of the hull by me head, so it didn't bother me. When we got up, it was still blowing from the northwest at about 20 knots, and stayed that way all day, until about dusk, when it finally laid down some. It was a clear, cool, dry day. At lunchtime, we went up to Snappa's for lunch, just to get off the rocking boat for a little while.
After eating, we went for a walk. We went east from the marina, past the shop where we have had the jewelry repairs done, which was the furthest we had been that way before. We walked all the way to the east end of the peninsula where the ferry landing to Hopetown and Man-O-War Cay is. On the way back, we detoured up a hill into a neighborhood. We were specifically looking for the castle built by The Out Island Doctor. We walked around the neighborhood and saw many nice homes, and finally found the street that went by the castle. The Out Island Doctor died in 1978, and his wife died in the mid 90's. For a number of years after that, his daughter operated a cafe and gift shop there, but it appears now to be just a private residence again.
Tonight is Junkanoo. If you missed the explanation of what Junkanoo is in my last log, click here for an explanation. Last week was the kids version, but tonight is the real thing. There were four different groups, each made up of twenty to forty people. One group, the Spring City Rockers, stood out to us as the best. I got a few pictures of them in the gallery. Back at the boat, we caught the end of the last Monday Night Football on ABC. The end of an era.
GPS N 26-32.806 W 77-03.207 Miles made good this leg 0. Total miles covered 3693.
Dec 27
Today was a quiet day. We just putzed around, read and watched a DVD. We had picked up three DVD's for a dollar each at Buck A Book the other day. The first one we were going to watch was Monster In Law. I had noticed that the DVD itself did not have any printing on it, although the box it was in looked legit. I put it in the DVD player, and it tried and tried and finally gave up and displayed a message that said 'wrong disc'. So I put it in my laptop. Again, it tried and tried, and eventually, it recognized the title of the DVD, but Media Player could not play it at all. So we tried Barb's laptop. There it seemed to play fine. So we settled in and started watching. About half way through, it stopped. We could hear the drive trying to re-read the DVD over and over, and out of frustration I whacked the laptop, and it started to play again. But soon it stopped once more. I found that if we physically moved the laptop a little, and kind of twisted it from corner to corner, it would play haltingly. After about ten minutes of trying to get it past the 'bad' spot, I gave up. So we don't know how the story turned out. Instead, we watched another one that we actually bought from a bargain bin in a store before we left TX. This one was Somewhere Tomorrow. It was Sarah Jessica Parker's first movie. It was OK. I looked it up on www.IMDb.com and noted that Sarah Jessica was the only actor in the movie who ever did anything after that.
We did take a dinghy ride around the harbor today. We went all the way out to the entrance to the harbor, then crossed over to the other shore, which is past where we have ever walked in town, then came back up towards the government docks where the large commercial ships bring in cargo. We were in pretty shallow water, and Barb noticed that we were leaving a mud trail behind us. Rather than get stuck out there, I turned around and went back in the deeper water. We then tooled back through the anchorage checking out who had come and gone. Several boats we have met have left, although I think they will be back here by the weekend.
GPS N 26-32.806 W 77-03.207 Miles made good this leg 0. Total miles covered 3693.
Dec 28
My project today is to build a ground plane for my Single Side Band radio. An SSB radio is a radio which communicates on the High Frequency radio bands. The HAM radio bands are a subset of what it can access. The main use on a boat is to access weather resources, cruiser nets, and it's an e-mail option. I installed it before we left, but where we have been so far, there has been no need to use it. The tricky part of installing an SSB is the antennae. The backstay of the rig is used as the "positive" part of the antennae, and the water is the ground part. The trick is to get the signal to the water. The most common way on a boat is to run three-inch wide copper ribbon from the radio to the keel, or to line the inside of the hull with this ribbon. The signal passes through the fiberglass. I have done this deal with the copper ribbon, and since I still don't really know what I'm doing with the radio, I don't know if I have a good installation or not. I read an article in Lats and Atts a few months ago about another way to accomplish this, using a homemade array of wires, cut to several different specific lengths for each frequency band you plan to use. So I worked today on building one of these. I figure it can't hurt to have both, and this new gadget is cheap. I didn't have quite enough wire to make all the lengths, so I'll have to go shopping tomorrow. I did assemble the mounting, and seven of the ten wires are cut and wrapped to the board.
GPS N 26-32.806 W 77-03.207 Miles made good this leg 0. Total miles covered 3693.
Dec 29
We woke to high winds today, as predicted. Glad we're at the dock, although once again, the boat bucks around in an unnatural motion at low tide when we are sitting on the bottom, the dock lines are nearly taut, and the waves rock us. The wind is forecast to lay down tonight and then stay pretty calm through to early next week.
We went into town in search of enough wire to finish my SSB project. We hit seven different stores, but none had what I needed. The NAPA store came closest, but didn't have the correct gauge. The only store that we didn't hit, and which is most likely to have it, is a marine store that is closed for the holiday week. So I guess the project will be on hold until next week. Or, we may have to get the wire while we're in the States in a couple of weeks.
Note that I have added another map to the site, which is the whole Bahamas. This give you an idea where the Abacos vs. the Exumas, vs. Nassau, etc are.
This may be the last update for the year. We wish everybody a happy and safe New Year. The logs for next year will start at a different link on THE LOGS link from the homepage, so if you have us bookmarked somewhere other than the homepage, you may need to update your bookmark.
GPS N 26-32.806 W 77-03.207 Miles made good this leg 0. Total miles covered 3693.