We are covered in salt, yesterday's beating coated the entire boat with a thick layer. With water at a premium we will remain salty for a while.
We also woke up this morning to NO CELL SERVICE !?!?!?!? What the heck? I tried rebooting the phone several times to no avail. Man that just sucks.
We decided to anchor in Big Majors Spot rather than Staniel Cay. There is a spot that has only 6 feet of water at low tide when you approach Staniel. That and the anchorage being rather tiny had us rethink our original plan. The two islands are right next to one another with Big Majors being just north of Staniel. It is easy to see why this is a favorite anchorage of the cruising crowd. It is fairly well protected from every direction but the west, has good holding and depth and is handy to Staniel. There are a number of boats here varying in size from small sailboats and cruisers to yachts in excess of 100 feet.
Big Majors is the home of the swimming pigs. How the pigs got here, I'm not quite sure, but they are quite the tourist attraction. They are indeed wild and they do swim. They are also quite aggressive at approaching you for food. They bring tour boats from Nassau to see these silly pigs who live where else ... Pig Beach. Which begs some really bad comments. Scott and I did a drive by but we weren't all that excited about having our dingy mutilated by a swimming pig so we passed on the actual stop.
We took the dingy over to Staniel to check out the town and yacht club. The town is tiny but had much to offer in the space. The yacht club has cottages that you can rent that are very attractive. There is a bar and restaurant, a small souvenir shop and a place to land the dingy.
In town we found two well stocked albeit tiny grocery stores, a Laundromat, library, a couple more restaurants and a church. There is reported to be another grocery store further out and a place to rent golf carts. We are kicking that idea around if it isn't over the top expensive. It would be fun to see the rest of the island and the ocean side beaches. We need to get some diesel fuel and want to get some drinking water while we are here.
While walking into town we discovered the mystery of the missing cell service. Apparently BTC is down! What.... all over? just here? No one seemed to know and no one knew when to expect it back. It's the islands mon. I'm beginning to think I am cursed. I was so looking forward to a web fix.
After walking through the town and checking out the grocery stores we decided to treat ourselves to linner at the yacht club. We had a beautiful table looking right out over the water. The place was spotless and the service was terrific and best of all the prices were not bad. Very comparable to what we would pay in the states. Scott had delicious bacon cheeseburger with fries and I had grilled mahi which was very generous in it portion served with a salad of fresh greens and home made Bahamian bread. YUMMO! We washed it down with a couple of beers. The Sands beer, which is brewed in the Bahamas, is really good. We dawdled over lunch for a good hour or more.
We headed back to the boat taking a detour to stop by the Thunderball Grotto (made famous in the James Bond movie Thunderball) just to check out the site. There were a couple of other dingies there and we didn't have our suits on or snorkeling gear with us. We might give it some thought one of the other days we are here, although Scott is not a big fan of caves. It is best visited at low slack tide when the current is not as strong. And when the wind is low which it has not been here for some time.
We may hang out here for awhile just doing some downtime and hoping that the front coming through on Sunday into Monday is the last for a while. Days on end of winds in the 20 plus knot range is wearing on us. When the cell service is up it's good and allows us to keep in touch with home.
This is the sign outside the library which is also the oldest home here.