We had a great time last night and I sure hope that Will and Mairi off Natural Magic did too. My spaghetti sauce was excellent, if I do say so myself, and as I mentioned yesterday Barb did a pumpkin pie and baked a couple of loaves of whole wheat bread.

This is a really interesting place to hang out on the economy. You never know who is sitting in the chair next to you. It may be a Bahamian who has lived here for generations or it maybe another tourist like us. We have met a couple of folks off some of the larger power yachts at the marina, and by larger I mean in the 80-100' range. Everyone seems to be really nice, unassuming and pleasant to talk to. One of the larger power yachts is called Bohemia and hails from Montreal. We didn't get a chance to meet them until after the holiday season when all their visitors left. The other is even larger and is called Note Bene and comes from Vancouver. After this visit to Hope Town apparently their boat is being put on one of those yacht transporters and being shipped back to Vancouver. Must be nice.

We are beginning to collect and clean shells for folks back home. It's rather fun but with the texture of the shell surface cleaning them can be a bit of a chore. Once they're clean you need to put a coat of clear varnish on it to bring out and preserve the colours.

The day is overcast and there is a chill in the air. The temperature has plummeted to 22 degrees Celsius. Brrr! I will be spending an inordinate amount of time in he hot tub to compensate.

We went into town this morning to make our weekly cash withdrawal from the bank and to see if we could get some fabric so Barb can fix our Canadian flag. Chris brought us down a new one but it is way to small and is only in place as a stopgap measure. We found a local canvas maker that had some red sail Dacron that she was prepared to sell us 1'x2' piece of. Then it was back to Nelleke where we removed the dingy pontoon covers so that Barb could replace some of the snap fastenings and patch a couple of tears where the dingy rubbed against the davits while we were under way.

Then we took a break to hit the hot tub.

Curses!

Someone had been filling with the controls and the hot tub wasn't hot, merely lukewarm. Now that I have readjusted the controls I will have to wait for the temperature to increase. I just hope that whoever it was doesn't get into it again and mess with it.

I have rewired the bilge pump to keep the cabling away from things that will snag in it and disconnect as has happened several times now when I have Ben working below. Hopefully that will put an end to that happening.

There was supposed to be a sailing club race tomorrow but the race committee is taking a stand that if there is no wind there is no reason to hold the race and as a result since the forecast tomorrow is for 4 knots of wind gusting to 5 it likely won't happen. We have two boats that we could sail on the Tartan 37 belonging to our friends Barry and Marcia or the Hunter 35 belonging to our new friends Will and Mairi. Both of them are off the hook so we could have tomorrow to work on boat projects: Barb on the flag repair and I on either the Suzuki outboard or the valve control panel for the water maker. Of course these are the islands. We might decide to do nothing.