Meet our latest edition to the Vanish Fleet. It's a Hobie Bravo Cat and the hull is made of tough rotomolded polyethylene and weighs in at 88.45 kg, about 195 lbs. We store it on the fly deck aft and when stowed for passage making, we are able to use the aft stairs and there's still room up there for more toys. Who's counting, but we now have 5 water craft on Vanish. The Hobie Bravo takes 20 minutes to set up from whoa to go and it performs really well in a wide range of wind conditions as the mainsail can be easily furled to suit all wind conditions and it comes with a boom and even has 4 beer can holders for those who partake. It's simple to rig and has decent upwind performance and is great fun as we've found out in the past few days Maynard probably wants to trick it out with instruments and carbon fibre sails.

Little Woody told us not to worry about sharks in the harbour because if one is spotted, the locals immediately "get rid of it" but the crew on a 30m catamaran Quintessential (http://www.superyachttimes.com/editorial/0/article/id/9868) in the marina told us that a large bull shark was swimming around their boat this afternoon. It didn't stop us though as we all took turns sailing on the water.

Until we came here, we knew nothing about Bahamian life. They enjoy sunshine and a lack of rules and regulations which are becoming so commonplace in the Western world plus they have low crime rates and we found a couple more reasons people seem so happy. There are no local taxes on capital gains, inheritance, corporate and personal income, nor dividends and interest. People speak English, there are many airports, roads and ferries and The Bahamas are close to the USA. The Bahamian archipelago is 100,000 square miles and stretches about 500 miles with 700 islands and cays but the total land mass is only 5,382 square miles yet there are only 350,000 and 2/3 of them live on New Providence where the capital Nassau is located so the rest of the islands are very unpopulated. 50% of Bahamian income comes from tourism. And we can eat outside and have yet to encounter a fly, mozzie or sandfly. There's a lot to be said for that!