Click link to see a movie overview of our time in Georgetown!

Today marks the end of the longest stop and the departure from the pristine Exumas! We are currently sailing East out of Elizabeth Harbor's North Cut in "Georgetown," Great Exuma. It's been nearly 3 weeks and as fun as it's been, adult summer camp is over and it's time to buckle in for some real sailing and adventure! Wait, wait, let's rewind for a minute...what is Georgetown and what happened there to keep us so long? Well that's sort of like asking yourself when you were a college student, after a night of drinking and bar hopping, why you went to bed at 7am and still have chicken nuggets stuck in your facial hair. You don't really know, you just know that you would do it again and it was a good time...

Time seems to stand still in Georgetown and every day is Groundhog day. Every morning at 8:00 am, hundreds of boats, spread out across at least 5 different anchorages in a 5 or so mile radius, tune into the morning Cruisers Net broadcast on the VHF radio. Here Herman, the chair of the net, covers the weather, reviews local businesses, discusses local events (volleyball at 2pm, DVD swaps and engine repair training at "Da Chat and Da Chill", etc) and opens the microphone to the "boaters general" (where cruisers can post things for sale, ask for help, etc). The "net" has announcements of boater arrivals and departures and closes out with everyone standing by on VHF channel 68. From that point on, hundreds of boaters from all over the world begin calling each other to discuss the salient material that was just introduced on the net and switching to various ship to ship VHF channels. This is all done with nearly flawless execution and symmetry from very experienced "boaters"...every, single, day! The amazing part is that you can't help but set an alarm and listen to the net on your VHF radio from the comfort of your bed, listening to all that is going on around you! It's remarkable how many laughs you get from eaves dropping in on other peoples open channel communications...imagine listening in on your neighbors telephone calls each day and you get the picture. Georgetown has boaters who came for a week and stayed for years, people who were bound for the Caribbean and decided to stay for months and turn back to the USA. It's an extremely fun and easy place to be. Volleyball every day and "Chat n' Chill" beach, bonfires, regattas, rake and scrape dancing every Monday, snorkeling, hiking, island exploration, private postcard beaches...you name it, all from an extremely protected anchorage where literally thousands of boats can be and barely get in each other's way. Above all else, you make friends. Similar or dissimilar, no one really knows why they are there or when they are leaving exactly and the fun just begins again the next day. The beauty is that these are "like" friends...people who cruise local and foreign waters on their boat and who fundamentally understand the allure to cruising that everyone in the harbor feels. They have persevered through many similar experiences and enjoyed the freedom and indescribable personal returns that only others who have traveled the world in this way truly understand.

Rach and I made a bunch of friends in Georgetown, but Mark (retired cop from NYPD) and Chrissy stand out. They were on a Catamaran just like ours, we met them in a grocery store and had a blast ever since. Needless to say, quite a bit of our fun was had together. From exploring the islands, to drunken darts, late night dinghy races to mixing it up with locals at "Eddies Edgewater" - we found plenty to keep ourselves entertained. We will miss them and hope we get to sail or hang out together again.

So what else? The fact of the matter is that we needed the right conditions for sailing from Georgetown to points southeast, such as Turks and Caicos. While waiting we managed to hike a mini mountain, purchase some elaborate coconut shell cups, party in the party island, prepare our taxes, do some actual work and get out and sail our boat every few days (usually to make water - we have a reverse osmosis system onboard that turns ocean water into drinking water). You go a little soft staying in Georgetown. The open Atlantic is not a cushy place most of the time. Heading out of Georgetown means getting your guard back up, doing your homework on weather/wave conditions, plotting exact courses and timing, keeping the ship ready for the worst and of course, sleepless nights on multi-day passages in open water...responsibilities of the highest order...preserve the boat and your lives at all times. So here we are, the sails are set, were making 9 knots and while leaving Georgetown we are saying our goodbyes over the VHF radio on a day when no one else sees fit to go (the wind is strong today). We should make landfall again in about 34 hours in Turks and Caicos, but you never know what will happen, just that you need to be ready for anything. Actually we tried to leave yesterday morning and woke up to a squall just minutes before leaving...pouring rain and 28 knot winds told us that we could relax for another day... You just can't control the weather.