We paid a brief visit to Ron and Pye aboard their rented Jenneau for a cuppa and to swap stories and to find out where they were heading during their vacation. They have already visited several places in the Abacos that we would like to see but Ron is hesitant to go any further north through the whale since they have to get the boat back to the marina by a certain deadline. We suggested that they should visit Man-o-War Cay and they are giving that some thought.

Last night we all got up at 04h15 to watch the last night time shuttle launch from the Kennedy Space Centre. We almost missed it as it was far enough away that the glow of the engines were only slightly brighter than the surrounding stars. I only caught it out of the corner of my eye because it was moving and then only for the last 5 to 10 seconds of its burn. At least we can say that we saw it. I am very curious about what is on their drawing board for the next generation of lift vehicles. What are they going to use to service the International Space Station? What will they use to service all the satellites? etc.

On a side note, I have re-started my efforts to get "Son of a Sea Cook" published. Long time followers of this blog may remember that I have written a cookbook for cruisers or RV travelers or campers; anyone who is looking at cooking in a small kitchen or galley. My emphasis is on planning, storage and design rather than recipes although there are lots of those too. The trouble was that even the self publishing organizations were expensive and there was something about them that struck me as "off". Our friend Marcia is an established author and she agrees with me and has steered me towards Lulu.com, a self publishing site wherein I can do a lot more of the work and reduce my costs to a small fraction of what it would be with the others. I would still get all the benefits that you would with the others including print on demand and registration with places like Chapters and Amazon but again at a fraction of the cost. Thanks, Marcia.

As I was getting breakfast ready we had yet another equipment failure - the propane detector shut off the propane system! When I opened the hatch to discover the cause I found that our lower bilge was full of water. A word of explanation is in order: the lowest part of the bilge would contain about 2 gallons of water if full and this morning it was. The rest of the more extensive bilge wasn't containing anything - yet! Clearly the real culprit or failure was in the float switch for the bilge pump. Obviously that wasn't doing its job and as a result the bilge pump was completely inactive. I checked that it was fresh water (it was) - great! I know that we have a small leak in the forward head cold water feed to the shower nozzle which runs down into the bilge under the floorboards. I normally hadn't been checking in the deep bilge so that collection could have occurred over several days and drip, drip, drip can become collected gallons quite easily if the bilge pump isn't pumping it out. Breakfast was done over on Troubadour and we got ready for the two hour trip over to Man-o-war Cay.

We made a beautiful trip on a superb day, the only negative thing being that although I had two fish hit my lure, none of them had done it decisively enough that they got hooked. (Sigh....no fish for dinner tonight!) Landfall at Mon-o-War Cay was not without adventure. It is a very small entrance and we had to wait for two boats departing before we could get in and then in the mooring field there was a premium on moorings including one that we originally picked up hat we got chased off by a fellow who told us that another guy had rented it for a month and had just left for a day. Fortunately a fellow from Dartmouth who also had his boat in at the dock was good enough to come out and point us at several moorings that we could take so we had a choice, a mooring from the marina who couldn't tell us that one of the moorings was reserved or one owned privately that was actually less in cost. Guess which one we took? There are a number of Canadians here in the marina either on moorings or at a dock, one of them was the fellow that guided us to a mooring and there is another one in from Lunenburg and of course there are now Patty Jean and ourselves. And, of course, we are hoping that our friends Ron and Pye will join us here in a day or two.

After a refreshing cuppa we went ashore for a stroll about town and to check things out. This is a really nice place! There are obviously long term residents and families here who have made a success built upon the shipbuilding industry. We saw numerous examples of Albury Brothers design of boats in the harbour and looked into their yard to see several others being built. The Alburys were one of the loyalist founding fathers of the Man-o-War settlement and there are a lot of them still around.

Tonight we went over to Barry and Marcia's house on Dickie Cay for a wonderful pasta dinner. Their pied a terre in the islands is a three building compound including a main house, a laundry house with accommodations called the bunkhouse and the lookout on the Abacos Sea side of the Cay. Having seen it we understand why they come back here year after year. They have also been kind enough to offer us the resources of the estate to help me resolve the issues with the chart plotter and the fresh water leaks, which I believe that I have diagnosed correctly as with the pressure water system turned off there has been no more water in the bilge. I really hope that I am not speaking too soon.