"We are not in Kansas anymore"

     Weather reports are “iffy.” Winds are supposed to kick up out of the east at 15-18 tomorrow and remain steady through Saturday.  That will cause problems crossing over to Nassau in time to meet family coming to meet Brunelle and Andiamo. So we listened in on our portable radios at 6:30 AM and made the decision to drop the mooring ball and head on out. 

Beautiful, but deceiving.

     We had a pretty sunrise courtesy of the clouds to the east, but there was a shelf of clouds above the horizon to the southeast.  Within a few minutes, we saw not one, but 4 water spouts emerge from those clouds.  Over the next 20 minutes they would disappear and reappear. 

I took this shot to show the tones of the water,
but you can see the shelf of the clouds where a few minutes later
we could see the water spouts.

 It was a first for all of us.  Thankfully, we continued east and the storm went south and dissipated.  By noon we were in partial sunshine.

Pete hard at work
on the Furler

     When we tried to unfurl our genny, she was really hard to unfurl.  Pete went forward and found that we had lost some very important hardware.  He was able to jury-rig a temporary solution so we were able to get some assist from the sail so we wouldn’t stray back too far from the others.  Brunelle, with her new propeller, really wants to move and we can only do 6 knots (7 MPH) as our cruising speed.

Nassau Harbor Control

     Pete had a real had a successful conference via satellite phone.  He did have problems, however, with the satellite voice mail system and is working on that. Once those were being handled, Pete wanted to reprogram what we see on the Garmin, I worked on editing pictures since there was only the same gorgeous blue waters to look at.

    As we approached Nassau Harbor, we called into Nassau Harbor Control requesting permission for entry. We needed to provide our name, documentation number, last port of call and where we are staying.  Once we were docked, Customs came to the marina.  We had already printed off the 5 sheets of papers that needed to be completed. Peter, our dock master, had given us a packet that contained two additional ones that we completed at attached to our packet along with our passports, driver licenses, boat documentation and entry fee. At 4:30 we had cleared customs and were able to replace the Q flag with the Bahaman flag. 

Nassau Lighthouse

      Pete was able to identify a lot of wifi, signals thanks to the wifi antenna we picked up over the holidays, and tried to get some work done.  I met some of our new neighbors.  Dennis and Mary are from Titusville.  This is their first cruise and they are loving it.  They leave tomorrow heading east after exploring the Exumas Land and Sea Park.  Bev and Bob invited us to join them for dinner at a Chinese place just down the road.

    We had problems with our 50’ electric cord being too short to reach to the connection.  The marina lent us a 25’ extension.  This might be a problem in the future. We will have to give this some thought.

     All of us gathered on the docks hoping to see the contrails of the Shuttle as it passed this way after takeoff at 4:45 PM.  Unfortunately, there was nothing to see.  This was the second to last Shuttle mission in the program.  Hopefully, we will be close to Titusville in April when the last one takes off.  Hopefully, it won’t be postponed like this one.   We were in Titusville when this was rescheduled in November for takeoff. How cool would that have been!!!!

     We met Bob and Bev at 6. It wasn’t a bad walk, but the marina area is rather seedy at night.  The Double Dragon Chinese Restaurant was a very clean place for eat in or take out. The food was good and plentiful; the service great. Bob and Bev shared their experiences over 30 years of cruising the Bahamas as well as the Great Circle. 

     As enjoyable as the company and food was, we were glad to get back to the boat.  The past three days had caught up with us and we had “hit the wall.” So good night all!

~  ~ (\_~ ~ ~     Kathy and Pete