Our life is not built around weekly schedules or calendars or holidays, but we did remember that today was Mothers Day (which means it must be Sunday). We aren’t really doing anything different from what we usually do, though. We stayed at Baker’s Bay. This morning we did some trouble-shooting on our SSB radio because we’d tried to talk to Passages last evening at the time and frequency agreed upon, and although we could hear Ed, he couldn’t hear me. We checked everything we could. We don’t seem to be getting any power on transmit. The only thing on the troubleshooting list that we couldn’t check was the junction of the antenna lead wire to the insulated backstay. That requires a stepladder on the aft deck, and we don’t carry a stepladder. I could go part way up the mast with the boatswain’s chair and then try to work my way back along the boom and then grab the backstay, but it would be very difficult to work in that position. Since we’re headed back to the states, we decided to wait until then to tackle the problem.

Bud went swimming and cleaned the boot stripe again. Our water line is at the bottom stripe of the triple stripe we have for a boot stripe. Because the water always covers it, and because it’s not bottom paint, it grows an algae beard. Bud wanted to take that off before we crossed back. He’s done it before and tried different tools. This time he used a Teflon pancake turner and it worked pretty well. We’re going to have to repaint the boot striping and we will probably use bottom paint on the lowest one, maybe even both the lower ones.

We bought a new Abaco guide (to supplement our Explorer Charts) at Man-O-War Cay Marina. It has maps of diving and snorkeling sites. I wanted to walk across to the Atlantic side and snorkel from that beach. This area is being redeveloped now and there seemed to be a lot of activity on the island, so we weren’t sure we would be welcome. Back in 1989 this was one of the areas developed as a cruise ship stop. They only used it for three years because the channel can get so rough in bad weather (they call it a rage, locally, and if the cruise ships don’t want to use it, you can bet that no other boats are going through). Anyway, from 1993 until 2005 this beautiful beach and bay sat empty except for all the cruisers. Then in 2005 the area was purchased for development. There is a huge new marina here with a “marina village”. We weren’t sure how much more was developed, but as I said, we thought we saw activity and figured we shouldn’t go wandering around. So we left Fuzzy on board (with half a stick of Pupperoni, thanks to Ed and Karin) and took off in the dinghy. I was VERY reluctant to try to take the dinghy to the Atlantic side. Even though it’s very calm today, there were still rollers coming in that were breaking on the reefs. We went around the end of the island, and it got rough enough that Bud was willing to pull onto the beach there. It connected directly through to the Atlantic side. Besides, another sailboat had pulled in and anchored this morning and it looked to us like a Norseman. They’d gone off in their dinghy and there was a couple getting into a dinghy on that beach that we thought might be them. We called out to them as we approached and they were from Topaz and it is a Norseman. We had a brief conversation hanging on to each other’s dinghies and decided to get together later for drinks. Then they went back to their boat and we went snorkeling where they had just been. The picture shows the beach at the cut out into the Atlantic. We snorkeled where you can see the darker water, that's a ridge of rocks.

It was nice snorkeling. We saw a lot of fish, some of which were big enough to eat and looked like good eating. Bud dove down and saw a couple of lobsters, one big enough for a meal for two. Lobster season is over, though, and we found out our fishing licenses for the Bahamas expired with our first visa, and we would have had to go to another agency (besides immigration, who extended our visas) to get them extended. Again, since we’re on our way out, we’ll forgo the fishing until Florida.

We stopped back at Topaz on the way back to the boat and all three of us (Fuzzy included) were invited aboard at 6:30 this evening. After we had supper and took Fuzzy ashore we went over to Topaz. It is the first Norseman we’ve been aboard since we bought Earendil. It was strange to be on a boat that was almost the same, but differed in little ways. The folks from Topaz, Teddy and Cynthia, are going to come over in the morning to see Earendil and maybe give us some tips. They’ve been living aboard and sailing on Topaz for seven years. And oddly enough, they spent three years in the harbor where we bought Earendil, and knew her former owner. In fact, Bud had seen their boat when we took Earendil out for her sea trial! The cruising world really is a small world.