Continuing south to Little Harbour, Abaco.

Day 51- Thursday, January 22, 2009
Well—wouldn’t you know it—today we are missing the winds!
The gale force winds we’ve been experiencing are now down to 5 – 0 knots! It’s a feast or famine sort of thing—we couldn’t get Caribbean Soul out of Marsh Harbour due to the heavy winds (and even stayed on the boat one whole day as the harbour was too windy and choppy for a reasonable dinghy ride ashore). But, today we figured would be our second glorious day of light-air sailing with the spinnaker. John even trailed the dinghy—rather than strapping it to the deck—so he could jump aboard and buzz about the big boat with the spinnaker flying to take lots of pictures. You may have noticed that there are no spinnaker pictures on this blog page. The wind died completely! We watched the knot meter register 1 knot of boat speed for about 5 minutes with no promise of more wind. So, we fired up the engine and throttled up to an impressive 6.5 knots! Our rationalization is that although the boat will eventually get there at 1 knot per hour, it really is more like drifting than sailing. Sometimes the roar of that ol’ engine is not a bad thing.
Here are two pictures of Marsh Harbour as we were preparing to leave. In the second one, you can see the calm Abaco Sea in the distance.

And, one hour into our trip south we spied a bright yellow catamaran heading directly at us! We didn’t panic—it just had to be Bob and Laurel on Sunburst. These great folks who we first met in Marshallburg with Leslie and Andrew Porter keep popping up on our horizons. Bob walked out and chatted while Laurel was steering from inside. Is this what a GAM is? Seems as if that was when to ships passed close at sea to exchange the news by hollering from one boat to the other—yep, that was what we were doing. Sunburst was heading north to Marsh Harbour so after we got caught up on all the news, we pressed on south to Little Harbour.

The last pictures are of Little Harbour. There are two of a beautiful Hinkley that swooped into the mooring and some folks from Canada at Pete’s Pub—the outdoor bar & grill here in Little Harbour.