Week Number Two in George Town

Days 75- 80- Week Number Two in George Town, Exuma

February 15 - 20, 2009

Wondering what we’ve been doing during our second week in George Town? I’ll bet you think we’ve just been sitting on the beach, drinkin’ Bahamian beer, and reading cheap novels---well not ALL the time. And, remember that Captain John celebrated his 54th birthday on Monday so he deserves to lounge around! Yay! I made chocolate chip cookies in our little oven and we celebrated with a neighbor boat. Somehow we feel like we are celebrating birthdays, Christmases and everything everyday!

Here is the birthday boy hiding from the sun under my straw hat.

The rest of this week we have been getting ourselves and the boat squared away for more sailing. Mom forwarded our mail so I’ve been sorting out bills and getting ready to file our income taxes online. Thanks Mom.
John has been busy fixing things. Our VHF radio just died on us and could not be revived. Finding electrical equipment here is next to impossible, but we really don’t want to travel with just our hand-held VHF—we need one hooked up to the antenna mounted on the top of our mast when we’re out on the ocean. It took John three or four days, but finally he found a guy on a boat here who had an extra radio—so now we’re all fixed—crisis over! Then, the boat hook handle got in the way of our wind generator on the back of the boat and one of the blades was destroyed! Oh my! We can sail without the electricity that generator produces, but it’s hard to run the refrigerator, stereo, inverter, and the lights! There absolutely are not any stores where you can buy wind generator blades, so we went to bed that night feeling pretty glum. In the middle of the night, John sat straight up in bed and said he thought he remembered seeing a spare set of blades stored somewhere in the boat. Was it wishful thinking or did he really remember seeing the blades so long ago? A quick search of some hidden storage places proved him right—we did have a spare set of blades (thanks to Caribbean Soul’s previous owners)! Today we motored over to a high dock and John made the repairs as he balanced on top of a piling. A nice cruiser—Larry—helped John get the job done. Here’s a picture just in case you think we’re kidding about balancing on the piling!

What else do we do? Well, on Sunday I went to St. Andrew’s Anglican Church—it’s the beautiful little white and blue church on highest part of the island. I attended this church 10 years ago when I flew down to spend a week here with John. I remember loving that there was no need for stained glass windows as the open windows showed God’s most beautiful colors—bright flowers just outside and the gorgeous blue water beyond. This time I quickly noticed there were no breezes in the sanctuary—they had air-conditioned! But I must tell that they didn’t put stained glass in the windows—the closed windows were clean and clear—God’s colors were still there outside the air-conditioned sanctuary. The service was very much like the Episcopal services at home except that they use the Providence of the West Indies Prayer Book and the service lasted 2 ½ hours!

We do spend a fair amount of time searching for internet connections. We’ve mentioned in past blogs some failed attempts and we’ve since experienced some more. Some restaurants say that they have internet connections, but their signal is so weak there’s not much point in logging on and paying their hook up fee. One of the best (no kidding) internet places is this little shack pictured below. In the series of pictures you can see what a strange little place it is with electric cords run everywhere and folks perched on tumble down furniture in the dark little shack emailing away. John found an electrical plug-in for our laptop behind the refrigerator. Skype phone calling through the computer is not allowed when there are a lot of customers as it uses up too much band width. You can see me in one of the pictures posting an earlier blog. Blogging is not always easy—and most of the time coming to shore means a 10 minute wet dinghy ride with the laptop inside a dry bag (thanks for the bag Finley!) But as one guy was saying today, “If it were all easy, everybody would be here!”

Our biggest project right now is planning our next sail. We’ve got all the charts out and we’re plotting and planning. Also, we are filling up the fresh water and fuel tanks. The weather predictions are still talking about fronts coming and going—we think we’ll just decide where we want to go next and jump out there when the wind blows in that direction! Chances are good that we will be sailing to some extremely remote parts of the Bahama Islands so we won’t be posting blogs or doing regular emailing during that time (couple of weeks?). George Town is a wonderful place with lots and lots of very nice cruisers (hundreds!), but two weeks here is enough—we’re ready to go sailing!