Saturday, April 18, 2009
We're still at the dock at Mangoes Marina. We plan to leave here tomorrow but have been taking advantage to all the amenities they offer. We have clean clothes and linens, which is always nice and our batteries are finally charged. It took a couple of days plugged into electricity to get the batteries back to full power. After two months on a mooring with only the engine to charge anything, we needed a few days at the dock. That is why a Honda 2000 generator is essential if you have no wind generator or solar panels, which we don't.
So the past couple of days we have cleaned cleaned and repair. Today we scrubbed the bottom of the dingy and the entire deck of the boat. We haven't had access to fresh water for a long time. The rain we have had the past couple of days helped rinse a lot of the salt off the boat so the job today was easy except for the dingy. What a smelly mess. But it is clean and stowed away for now. We have been using the hard dingy for the past couple of weeks since we had the accident with the outboard taking a dip. We don't really trust the inflatable so will have to take the engine off at night. But at least the rubber dingy is easier to lift on and off the boat.
The winds have been howling since the last cold front passed through here Wed. night. The temperatures have been cooler also which has been nice. But the winds are supposed to calm down some tomorrow and shift around more to the East. So we will leave the dock. We still have more places to see before heading to our next adventure. We do have another cold front coming through here sometime this coming Tuesday or Wednesday. Then the weather map looks good for a while. Maybe the fronts are over with for this year. Yeah!
There are lots of boats starting to leave the Abacos. They are docked or anchored in various harbors waiting for a good weather window to jump into the ocean. There are many cruisers from the New England states that are starting to work their way back to the Coast and then on up to their home ports. They have a long way to go since many of them travel up the Intercoastal Waterway. The journey is slow because of all the bridges and tidal currents along the way. John dislikes the Intercoastal. He'd rather wait for a good weather window and then go up the coast as far as the weather will permit. Of course that means traveling day and night. I'm not crazy about that but for a couple of days at a time it is OK. Anyway we aren't having to deal with that yet.