The above picture is of a young girl, Miranda, who lives here in the harbor. Like most of the boat kids she spends a lot of time outside playing. In fact hardly a day goes by that we don't see Miranda out doing something. A few days ago we were talking to some other cruisers on shore and along came Miranda carrying her friend. Turns out that she is quite a good stalker and huntress. She followed this iguana up a tree and grabbed a hold just before the pair of them fell out of the tree. Miranda held on and ended up with the iguana.

What we learned from watching and listening to her is that, obviously, she is afraid of nothing and iguanas calm right down once you get a hold of them. I also learned that of the four adults talking to her, I was the only one willing to actually touch the iguana. When I should the picture to Ben he claimed that not only would he not chase down an iguana he wouldn't be in a big hurry to touch one either. Both of our girls were even less thrilled with the idea of touching the iguana then Ben when we sent them pictures.

Two days later we ran into Miranda again and she had another iguana, much smaller this time. She found it in the mangroves. She claimed that they are quite fast when climbing through the mangroves, but apparently not fast enough.

George and I think that it's really too bad that Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom is no longer on the air. Clearly Miranda could easily have filled in for Jim whenever he was unavailable to assist Mr. Perkins.

Other than that excitement the only other news is, despite a week of high winds and rain, most of our friends have left for other shores. Several are spending the rest of the season in the Bahamas. Steve and Kathy from s/v KIT are on their way to destinations much further south, as in Trinidad, and are not sure when they'll return this way. Fortunately, there are still lots of people around including many friends and more arrive everyday. Ben is on shore now hunting down Christie from s/v Kitty Wake who just arrived today.

Tomorrow we are off to the Miami boat show. George is hoping to hunt down some kind of a deal on solar panels. He's getting ready to install a new charger today and then he's going to buy four new batteries. Right now we have to run the generator way too much. He hopes to get at least two panels installed quickly. We'll see.

I've almost finished the sanding of the teak on the deck. Once that's done I think the next project will be new deck paint. We've had several friends who have used Kiwigrip. It's water based and was designed specifically for boat use. Everybody we've talked to likes it and recommends it highly.