Another cold front expected!
01/19/2009, GTC

Yesterday was spent swimming in the ocean on a wonderful deserted beach.... Our friends, Bill and Ginny, are surprised at the miles and miles of beautiful empty beaches, sparkling white sand, and absolutely empty.........just us Canadian sailers, all alone, looking out at the Atlantic Ocean.

Another fabulous dinner of red snapper ( we've run out of propane and got the use of a 20lb tank while we await the return of our two 10lb bottles next Thursday).

We cycled up to the Green Turtle Club (7 km each way) for a cold beer on the patio, and we were the only folks in the entire club. Tourism is VERY slow!

Thanks to the entire day of sunshine, we returned to find the batteries completely full and all deficits (100Ah) eliminated. Wonderful not to have to run the generator!

Louise is marinating a small leg of lamb with local found herbs of Spanish oregano and rosemary with garlic from Echo Dr. It should be very special.

Bill ( a professional photographer)has been out shotting hundreds of photos which I am hoping to post on this blog. His camera is rather fancy, and the typical file size is 10-20Mb. So we'll have to figure out the "low res" setting!

This morning Louise awoke the boat to see a rather spectacular "full" rainbow right across the harbour.... my camera does not have a wide angle lense, but I tried to capture the early morning mood.

Tomorrow's forecast is 60+ winds, so we'll enjoy the day exploring New Plymouth, and do some tuneups on the bikes. It's been great to have 4 bicycles on board so that everyone can tour the island, but the older two bikes need some routine maintenance. The saltwater environment is pretty hard on them.

Lot's of fun!

glen

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Wonderful sunshine!
01/18/2009, GTC

After three days of cool northern winds, the sunshine has returned, and we're swimming off of the boat and the cleaning and polishing continues.

Our friends Bill and Ginny arrived on schedule via the water taxi, having spent an interesting time in downtown Nassau at the Towne Hotel, a well known tourist hotel catering to relaxed backpackers, and within easy walking distance of the entire downtown core.

We spent yesterday walking the beach, swimming, and buying another wonderful dinner of lobster tails.

Bill and Ginny brought a wonderful selection of cheese, chariso, olives, stuffed grape leaves, roasted red peppers, etc.etc.etc. We'll have trouble find a place to put all of this wonderful new food.

Today is a good day for the solar panels, so we'll see how much energy we can recover. We've lost about 100Ah over the past three cloudy days. Louise is making bread today, and between the grain mill and the kitchenaid dough mixer, a lot of 110V energy is used. I'll have to wait until tomorrow to start up the watermaker again.

Heavy winds expected tomorrow (50kph+) so we'll relax here a couple of more days and then head south to explore Man-of-war and Marsh Harbour (the third largest city in the Bahamas with 5000 people).

glen

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overcast and cool... strong north winds
01/15/2009, GTC, Bahamas

The harbour is slowly filling up with sailboats avoiding the strong north winds, and waiting for better sailing weather before moving on.

We noticed a sign at the local grocery store (Sid's) offering Crab claws, and asked about there availability because we really enjoyed them last year in southern florida and the keys.

Like in Florida, they are caught in large crab traps (off the Cays in deep water) and when hauled up, the crabber simply breaks off one claw and returns the live crab to the water where it can grow another claw. Sustainable fishing!

I hope they taste as good as they look!

glen

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