For the most part Bahamians are pretty religious people, so everything shuts down on Sundays. We saw Roosevelt Nixon in the morning, but he was just coming by to check on things and then said he was heading out to church. Since the wind was down a bit, this seemed like the day a lot of folks were leaving, so for most of the day we had the harbor almost to ourselves. The photo shows Earendil floating alone at her mooring, where there had been about 10 boats in view.

This seemed like an ideal day to try to get in touch with family. I’ve been using the Internet on board, but the connection has been iffy for phone calls using SKYPE. I thought we could take the computer up to the yacht club, get good reception and have no one around so still have quiet. We did just that, stopping on the way to try to pull Bud’s fishing hook out of the rocks (lost another hook). But the network I use from the boat wasn’t even showing up at the club, and the one that was wasn’t giving a good connection. We called both our moms but although we could hear them, they were having a very hard time hearing us, so it wasn’t much of a conversation. We gave up and came back to the boat.

When cruisers get together they often mention the things they miss most about normal life. Usually long hot showers and unlimited plumbing are tops on the list. For me, the top item is good communication. I don’t mind being away from my family, but I’m used to unlimited minutes on cell phones and not being able to talk to my daughter for an hour at a time is killing me. We’ve been looking into communication alternatives and nothing looks great.

The things that are hardest to supply on a boat are power, water and communications. We do OK with power when the wind blows, but we’ve decided we need an arch and more solar panels for the sunny days with no wind. As for days with no sun and no wind, we really haven’t seen any of those. Still nights could be a problem, but basically you just shut most things down and go to sleep. Water is available here, but a pain to get. You have to go into a dock to fill your tanks and it costs forty or fifty cents a gallon. We would like to add a watermaker. Then the only thing we’d need to go to shore for is fuel, and even as a sailboat, we’re not going to get away from that. We’ve only bought 30 gallons of fuel since leaving Stuart, Florida, though, so that doesn’t seem like too much of an issue. So we think we can make changes to keep us pretty self-sufficient off shore, but we don’t have the communication thing fixed to my satisfaction. I’ll be happy to be back in the states and have my cell phone work. Maybe we should just hang out in Puerto Rico.

I did manage to get a picture of the smaller of the two turtles that seems to hang around here; you can check it out in the gallery. And the most important part of the day…Bud caught a snapper! The bait of choice is mozzarella cheese, who knew.