It is Friday, February 10th and we are underway in the Windward Passage between Cuba & Haiti. We sailed all night and then today the wind is lighter so we're motoring. We hurried up and got ourselves to Georgetown, Bahamas to get the boat loaded up with produce & fuel, do laundry, etc in order to use this light weather window since we had some easting to do. We left on Wednesday and hope to continue straight through to the Panama Canal if we can, just to get back on track for timing. So far it has been a most pleasant trip, easy and very pretty with nice weather & a gorgeous full moon still which makes the nights much brighter and easier. There's been a lot of shipping on this route and I'm so thankful we have AIS to better track them and call them by name if necessary. I hope next year we can buy the transmitter so we can transmit our position to everyone around us as well. Right now we only receive their position reports which is most helpful but having more is certainly better if you can afford it.

This is the 3rd time we've passed by Cuba's pretty, mountainous coast and I always have all these thoughts about how different a country can be despite the fact that it's borders are so close to the US and all that we enjoy as citizens. While we do love to travel, I haven't found a place I'd rather live than the USA. And it also seems odd that we are still not free to stop in Cuba even though we keep sailing by it.

So Jon ended up being crew in 3 more of the regatta races the following day at Little Farmers. They came over to the boat in the morning & said they still needed him so….. by the end of the day Saturday he was all bruised up from riding the plank and ready to be done! It was a great experience but you can only take so much… The more colorful pictures on Picasa are from the race that morning where I dinghied out to the course to get closer. There were no women on the boats so I had to be a spectator. Probably just as well!

We had a quiet evening that night and I cooked the grouper that Jon had speared a couple days before. We spent the following day with Frank & Debbie- did a really nice drift dive with Frank, speared some lobster and then went out to dinner that night to watch the Superbowl but for some reason the place we went ended up only receiving the stats for the game, not the game itself. Anyway, the next day I woke up with ciguatera symptoms- a neurotoxin present in some reef fish including grouper. There was a delay between my eating it and getting symptoms. Since we'd had this 14 years ago, it was easy to recognize. Mainly it results in nausea, fatigue, body aches, mouth tingling and sensitivity to cold in mouth & hands. So that's what I've got. I feel better than I did but hope the tingling and cold sensitivity resolves over the next several days. Jon has the same symptoms but milder; he's larger than I am and I had a worse case last time- it builds on itself. I think I'm going to hang up eating any reef fish from now on as I cannot afford to get this again. We should've sought local knowledge on whether this fish was OK to eat since it varies by area but we thought that it was OK. We have a freezer full of lobster which doesn't pose a risk but I'm still not in the mood for it. So I've been making meatloaf, roasting chicken, beans & ham- anything that doesn't involve seafood for the moment! Hopefully it will all pass.

For the short time we were in Georgetown which was less than 48 hrs, we did cram in a walk on the beach at Stocking Island. This beach is one of the best beaches we've ever seen and we've seen a lot of 'em! It has great shelling, is aesthetically very beautiful, it is loved by the mass of cruisers that stay in Georgetown all winter so there's no trash, they made a great trail that crosses the island and the sand is wide, white and beautiful. We'd remembered this beach from last time but now that Georgetown is even more popular with boaters, it is even better since they're taking care of it. Plus Georgetown is a great little town with a real supermarket. We are once again flush with good produce. On the way to Georgetown we saw a whale repeatedly breaching- always funny to see.

So, we had a wonderful time in the Bahamas and wished it could have been longer. The Bahamians were so warm and friendly and reached out to greet us. We also really appreciate the way you don't have anyone trying to sell you anything, you don't have to “hire” someone to watch your dinghy- we found the islands to be doing well and the people happy which makes us happy. The water is stunningly beautiful and the islands we visited were peaceful and just the way we remembered them except better- more trails! We're glad we came this way!

I guess I can take the Bahamian flag down today and with any luck, in a few days I can haul up the yellow Q-flag to get ready to check in to Panama!