03/28/2008, George Town. Where Else?
O.K. If you really thought she was going to let me stay, raise your hand.
If you raised your hand, your dismissed.
We're leaving tomorrow, Saturday 032908, for Black Point Settlement. Now just between you and me, my current location is much, much nicer. It's a bit of a hike to the real nice beaches from the anchorage at Black Point. The people are very friendly, however, so I'll manage (they have free wifi in the bar...shhhh).
I took some shots of the nav charts to show where we are and were we'll be.
For our route north, we plan to work our way up the Exuma chain, and probably cut out from Normans Cay and cross over to Eluthra. Work our way to the north of Eluthra, then jump out to the Abacos. All subject to change, of course. By the time we work our way thru the Abacos, we should only have about 550 nmiles (as the crow flies) to Norfolk.
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| Leaving Georgetown032808 |
03/28/2008
Lets see...I'm 30 yards off of an excellent beach, 100 yards off of an even nicer one. There are a bunch of trails, some of which lead to the ocean beaches, which are usually all mine. The water is nice and clear with only the occasional shark. We have good protection for the blows, free water and a grocery store.
Now when we move, we'll find some excellent beach (if we're lucky) that I can anchor 30 or so yards off. It'll have the protection from the current weather, or at least the best I can do. We'll probably not go beyond the beach, so doesn't matter if there are trails. And very unlikely that there will be any grocery stores.
Bottom line. We stay here, we have nice beach. We go, we have nice beach. Nice beach is good. So Michele is correct, I'm not in any hurry to leave (besides that, the states suck. I don't want to go back).
OK. Off to look at the charts. Gotta find where we'r e going to next.
Oh Yea, did I mention that I have Wi-fi here as well?
View:
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| Still in George Town032808 |
...Tim
03/26/2008, Georgetown, Great Exuma Island, Bahamas
Marghi was the one who dubbed this place Neverland. I however named it Hotel California and we had decided that it was definitely somewhere in between or rather a combination of the two. I call it Hotel California because you can check out anytime you want but you can never leave. W/ that in mind or despite that, we are planning on leaving here on Friday, weather permitting, although Tim is only doing it under duress. We got our mail last week, Fedex overnight only took about 9 days to get here but it took Tim a couple of days to figure out what he needed to do w/ it. Then the next cold front came through and we have great protection here so we had to wait that out. When a cold front comes in, winds clock around into the north quadrant usually accompanied by high winds and sometimes gusts and occasionally squalls. Temps don't really drop, its just the speed and direction of the wind and in the Bahamas, there aren't that many places that have good protection from northern winds so sometimes you have to stick around places that do have it.
We went into town today to provision for our departure and stop at immigration. Tomorrow we'll go back and finish provisioning and grovel at immigration. We have to finish provisioning because both grocery stores were out of eggs, Mom's bakery was out of bread, hopefully the next boat will bring more produce and we need to stock up on alcohol because there was no room for any on the dinghy ride today. We have to grovel at immigration because while our cruising permit they gave us in Bimini is good until something like August, our immigration expires in 3 months meaning April 13th and today they told Tim that he had to come back 1 week before and there are no other immigration offices in the whole Exuma chain except in Georgetown so we would have to hightail it north and be in Nassau by April 13 (although today she said we could be a week late) which would suck because we were hoping to leisurely enjoy some of the Exuma islands that we missed on the way down.
Don't get me wrong, this place is fine but it is still a crowded although large anchorage and we are anchored right by a very pretty beach w/ a trail that goes over to the sound/ocean beach, there is continuous chatter on the radio as everybody yacks all day, lots of activities, grocery stores and amenities but I'm looking forward to a little bit of solitude and some more peaceful and serene anchorages and the various nazis get a little tiresome after a while. There are radio nazis and volleyball nazis and anchor light nazis and so on. Also, every time a coldfront comes in, everybody likes to anchor real close to us must be our turkey charisma.
Tim is content here because there's a nice beach to take Giz to and life here is easy for him and Gizmo is just plain comatose between the long walks on the beach, us being around and all of the dinghies buzzing by us that he gets to bark at. Anyway, after Friday, our contact will be erratic again as we start (hopefully slowly) making our way back up north.
