Still here in Boot Key with another front moving in tonight. Winds are expected to be in the 25 to 30 knot range. We brought in more water for the front tank this morning in an attempt to keep it nearly full. The back tank is connected to the water maker and for the most part we have been using the water maker to keep that tank somewhat full. We managed to overflow it the other day and wet the bunk down. It's venting system is a bit conflugled by a filter we have in line between the vent and the tank. Not a terrible disaster and we had good sunny weather to dry out the mattress. We have to run the water maker every 5 days to keep it in commission and not bugger up the filters and membranes.

We continue to look for a good weather window to make the jump. Meanwhile we have been going through the perishables we stocked in, so yet another trip to the market will be in our future before we leave.

Monday night we had a cook out with some fellow cruisers in the harbor. The crews from Maggie M, Rainbows End, Kittywake and one other boat whose name is escaping me. Maggie M were the organizers. We took our dingys to the beach and cooked out overlooking Hawks channel. We ended the evening with a sing along to a song Chris (Maggie M) had written. What a hoot. The captain didn't actually sing but he did seem to enjoy it. It was a great meal with lots of laughs and stories.

Last night we spent a nice happy our on Moore to Sea ( Jill and Randy) along with Jim from Windarra and his sweet pooch Ali. Being velcroed to Boot Key hasn't been at all painful.

I've been trying without much success to copy our charts from the new chart plotter to an SD card so I can use Garmin Homeport on the PC to do routes while we are underway. Right now I do the routes on the IPad and then send them via e-mail so that I can download them to the computer and then onto an SD card to transfer to the chartplotter. A rather convoluted and onerous process, one that requires internet or cell phone access once we are underway. Where we are going that will not always be available. Manually entering the way points into the plotter is doable but a tad error prone, not to mention time consuming. At any rate working with charts seems to take up a good deal of my time. We'll need the computer to store the routes as the plotter can only hold 100 routes and we'll be using more than that as we travel between the multiple islands of the Bahamas. We do have the paper Explorer charts and the Maptech version on board. And we have the Bad Elf for the IPad that alows us to use it as a chart plotter. Redundancy is a good thing to have on board!
The picture is of Maggie M, she is on one of the mooring balls adjacent to us. If you look closely you will see a kite being flown by one of the boats just beyond her.