Cruisers have to be the most social lot of people I've ever run across.

After a day of errands and a little of this and a little of that as days in port so often seem to be, a great gang of us trooped over to the Nort' Side Beach Restaurant. Rose is the woman in charge - of cooking, hostessing, serving, chauffering, and that night was assisted by her son Ashley. Some of our friends had been there last week and had a wonderful time so Solitaire decided to go again with Madcap. As it tends to do in cruising circles, the group grew and grew until there were 25 of us. Because the restaurant is on the other shore, about a 10-minute drive from the main anchorage, Rose offers free valet service from Dingle's garage and most of us piled into her car and van there.

It was another one of those fabulous evenings of beach walking, socializing, and good Bahamian home cooking. I don't know how these women can produce such feasts for huge crowds of people in small kitchens all by themselves. We had a choice of chicken, grouper or conch, served with peas n' rice, macaroni, potato salad, coleslaw - mostly ordered ahead of time, but because the group had kept growing all day, she asked for a last minute show of hands for each entr�e and then set to work.

A visit to the beach yielded sea hearts, hamburger beans, and some interesting shells for some of us, and an appetite whetting walk for others as we listened to the gentle roar of that wonderful surf rolling in, felt warm sand under our feet and gazed at palm trees leaning out over the hills. Back at the restaurant we met new friends and reconnected with old ones, playing the ever-present game of swinging a ring to catch on the hook on a post. It shows up in many places and some of the folks are pretty good at hooking it.

I'm sure we ate every scrap of food in her kitchen, and I know we drank all the beer and wine until it was time to pile back into the van for multiple trips back to our dinghies. Those dinghy rides "home" after dark remain one of my favourite things about this life - it seems so absolutely exotic to ride across the water and through the darkness as we each pick out our own twinkling anchor light and call out our goodnights.

Thursday started with one more round of errands in town - fuel, groceries, ice, laundry pickup - Janet picks up laundry from Dingle's, washes, dries it and returns it within 24 hours all for $6.00 per load (washed and dried - I've paid more to do it myself!). Then we were ready to follow in the wake of all the boats that had already pulled out. Many of them headed for Governor's Harbour while we opted to go to Alabaster Bay. Werplayin and Interlude were already there and Rachel E pulled in shortly after us. Deb and Paul (Werplayin) were entertaining, and the 8 of us had a fabulous evening enjoying their hospitality. Tom (Interlude) was kind enough to act as chauffeur so we didn't even have to put the dinghy down. We peered through his looky bucket to see that our anchor was pretty much lying on the sand but with 90 feet of chain out and no wind we didn't budge at all.