Happy new year! Here are some of the highlights of the fabulous week we spent with our kids over the Christmas holidays. The day they arrived, a front was passing through and it was rainy & Windy. It poured on us on the dingy ride back and everybody got soaked, but nobody seemed to care. Stories of their plane ride on the small plane from Nassau to Staniel kept everyone laughing. We did Thunderball Grotto the next morning at 7:30am - trying to hit slack low, but we were late and the currents were pretty strong. But we did it and got to check it off the list. We then headed up to Compass Cay to go to one of our favorite anchoring spots on a E / SE wind. It was perfect. The kids snorkeled the shoreline right off the boat and found some small but nice reefs that were loaded with fish. Christmas day we went searching for Conch to have for lunch, and even though the first spot did not produce, a couple of new spots provided plenty - Barbara was a quick study and soon was keeping up to Karen on finding the conch. We had an excellent meal of Ham, Cabbage rolls, meatballs etc etc for Christmas dinner - the sunset was beautiful, it was a great day. After a quick snorkel on boxing day, we pulled up anchor and headed a few miles north into the Exuma Land & Sea park and picked up a mooring at Cambridge Cay mooring fields. (I hate picking up a mooring - our boat does behave well) The place is beautiful and the reefs are teeming with fish, as their is no fishing/hunting/conching allowed. Just after we anchored, we heard this huge splash and while we were looking for the source of it, the Stingray made a second leap into the air - 3 or 4 feet and the thing looked huge. We saw or heard 6 or 7 more jumps like that while we there there! We took the kids over to a couple of snorkeling spots and they were fantastic. The "Sea Aquarium" was the highlight. And all of this is right beside Johnny Depp's private island. The amount of fish swimming around was unbelievable! We did a number of other snorkeling trips while in the park and walked around on the beach on the "outside" - the beach exposed to the open ocean. We headed back and stopped at Sampson for a night and then back to Staniel for the Pirates party and to drop the kids back off at the airport the next day. The Pirate Party was a blast with tons of people and alot of great costumes.

We have been unwinding at Staniel since the kids left. They had a party for the cruisers that had free food and drinks - it was fantastic - Conch salad, conch fritters, fried hog snapper, steamed snapper, steamed lobster and of course mac & cheese. The next day they had class C races where anybody could sign up to sail with the boats. I ended up not doing it, but we had an excellent view of the races from the boat and enjoyed watching the races.