Midway into my week aboard the Koala and we've got a rhythm: I loll around reading and soaking up the sun, and the 2nd mate and the Cap work their butts off. Poor 2nd mate needs someone to play with! He wants to explore underwater caves and jump from the cliffs into a churning sea. He wants to dive down to the sunken ship at dusk when the sharks are sure to be there. Instead, he is forced to take naps while the old folks read in the sunshine.

But I digress. We left Nassau none too soon for the Cap, who prefers his layovers out under the stars, no shouting boatmen calling to one another, no scratchy am radio stations blaring at oh dark thirty. He growls when, out here in the wide-open spaces of Exuma Land & Sea Park, a boat with a generator and more than three people dares to hint that it might be looking for a mooring.

He doesn't growl much; we are in paradise. The horizon to our west is endless. The weather has been perfect from a landlubber's perspective, but Cap and Chris the radio weather guy consult at 6:30 every morning. Is the wind from the SE or the ESE? Are the swells 3 feet or 2.5? What is it doing in Highborne? In Warderick Wells? In Stuart, FL? Everything is analyzed to a fare-thee-well and Jim has something to worry about for a few hours. We stayed 36 hours in Highborne on Chris's advice, and while we were fine at anchor with the protection of the cay, we wouldn't have been too happy trying to sail. We're glad Cap is a stickler.

The cays are desolute, beaten by the wind, sandy and craggy with porous limestone that makes for shaky footing as you follow the trails all over the park. The beaches are small, sandy white crescents that dot the edges of the cays. The sea is the color of the water in somebody's pristine pool in the Ft. Lauderdale suburbs. But walking in the interior of the cays is treacherous. 2nd mate and I took off inland, up and ove to Bush Beater's Beach (seriously!) and left the Cap with the dinghy at Capture Beach. We were probably gone for an hour, and returned to find him ensconced in the dinghy with a juryrigged umbrella thingy like some Robinson Crusoe surviving on a deserted island. This Krew kracks me up!