Sailing Dreams

After 5 days on the mooring ball, we were thrilled to get underway on Tuesday morning, 10 January. Enroute to Staniel Cay, the weather was pretty rough, but at one point there appeared a beautiful double rainbow. It was so huge out on the water that we couldn't get a full shot of it in one camera view. We thought we might anchor off Staniel Cay, but the winds and seas were fearsome, so we headed directly into the Staniel Cay Yacht Club.
The Yacht Club is a small resort, as well as a marina. It offered a very inviting and picturesque setting, with colorful cottages for rent. Of course, it also had an attractive restaurant and bar, complete with large screen TVs and pool table. Just off-shore there was a school of 6 foot nurse sharks, referred to as Yacht Club "Pets". They were pretty scary looking, especially at feeding time.
Naturally, we arrived at Staniel Cay Yacht Club at low tide, and we had only 1.9ft under the keel on our approach to the docks. We hooked up shore power thinking our 110V problems would be resolved, but not a chance. We spent a few hours troubleshooting that afternoon to no avail. We thought we might have a couple bad circuit breakers, and hoped to have them flown-in from Ft. Lauderdale. We spent the next morning on the phone with Johann, Re-fitz, Inc. from Ft Lauderdale consulting us with our electricity problems. Turned out not to be circuit breakers, but a voltage inverter issue, which would have to wait till we reached a place to offer marine services, possibly Georgetown. For this visit, Elton rigged an extension cord from our washer/dryer outlet that doesn't use the inverter, and we have all the 110V we could possibly want. Of course the yacht club internet was down, but being the ingenious guy he is, Elton rigged our Wirie internet booster with a BTC card, and hallelujah hotspot!
We rented a golf cart and proceeded to check off some much-needed boat chores, like taking the trash to the dump and doing laundry. The laundry was also the wholesale??? liquor store, and by the time we left we had 6 loads of clean clothes, 2 bottles of spiced rum, and were $100 poorer. Luckily, the mail boat arrived the next day, so we could buy fresh produce, and lots of other provisions. We visited every shop on the island and thought we struck gold with all the fresh produce we were fortunate enough to buy.
The next day, noting that we had completed every "need to do" activity, we decided to tour the island .... Which took less than an hour. We also drove into a very "exclusive" area of the island in which every home was absolutely gorgeous and grand. There was a "waterfront" for sale sign there, but decided against inquiring .... Wonder why?
Anyway, after returning the golf cart we walked back to the marina and noted another Fountaine-Pajot catamaran docked right behind us. This cat was a little larger (47') and a little older (1999) than ours. After saying hello to Jerry and his wife Phillis, and talking about our French-made boats, we realized that we had the same charger/inverter problem. It turns out, after talking to Vitron Energy Tech Support, our inverters were receiving too high voltage and would consequently not operate. After all that trouble-shooting, it has come down to a high voltage issue from shore, and there's nothing the marina can do about it .... Oh well .... We in the Bahamas .... Be happy ;).
Over the next few days, we walked the entire island at least once. We visited the Ho Tai Beach Park, Pirate Trap Beach, Ocean Beach, and the Bonefish Creek. The views were absolutely spectacular! The winds were up most of the time, so we didn't do a lot of swimming. We visited the now closed Thunderball (think James Bond) Club which was used by the Hollywood group during the filming of Thunderball. One day, we took the dinghy to Thunderball Grotto and snorkeled the same underwater cave that was featured in the film. We were the only people there at the time, so it made for a pretty magical experience. There were numerous varieties of colorful fish, and several schools circling around us, as we swam around them. All-in-all, our visit to Staniel Cay was very extremely enjoyable and very relaxing.