2007.12.15 Hope Town

We arrived in Green Turtle Cay last Sunday and stayed five days…. We do love New Plymouth still very unspoiled although we did notice the houses getting smarter looking, fresh paint …and some developer is building condos, we think he is asking just short of a million….the locals say he has not sold any yet!!!!
The marina where we stay on Black Sound is very laid back to say the least, Kevin the owner seems to be enjoying life and is not extremely pro active at keeping his marina in good shape and maybe that’s part of its charm…. he has a great spot that sells itself and he knows it… we did things quite differently this time around… never went to the “Wrecking tree café” but hung out at Pineapple’s beach bar where we had wifi, nice drinks and great sunsets.
We met up with a couple of Canadians from Ottawa, who had dragged anchor and almost plowed into Soli at one in the morning back in Manjack Cay… it was nice “running into them” but not so literally…
We went to our beach and walked all around the South end of the cay…Jacqueline found her first sand dollar, we found starfish and even a live sea biscuit… and David a conch shell.
We also found out that our dinghy, which we had spent a whole day patching up in Westend still leaks….these supposedly inflatable floors, Zodiac anyway, are no engineering marvel as far as we are concerned…I have never heard David use profane language like this before and of course being French like Zodiac I felt responsible … especially since I had talked David out of buying a new one this summer while in Canada or the States and of course now it’s very difficult to find one in the Bahamas and also much more expensive…. I messed up on that one!!!!
Well it works well enough for David to come and get me at the dock!!!

Please note the banking hours !!!

We also found that our macerator was still not working on our way from Green Turtle to Great Guana Cay…. So yesterday, anchored in idyllic Fisher’s bay instead of relaxing after having made the potentially stressful Whale Cay passage without any problem we were experiencing the literal meaning of ASDIP (an another s----y day in paradise) !!!!! we took the b----y macerator apart AGAIN and saw that the new impeller we had just replaced was missing a couple of paddles!!! We were somewhat discouraged to say the least and since we did not have another spare we started reassembling the pump again… Captain Weber, monitoring our progress (from the cockpit of L’Equipe anchored nearby) or lack thereof hailed us over our walky talkies and started talking about rotation…clockwise or anti…at this point we were so fed up but we started taking it apart AGAIN and really studying all the components very carefully…I won’t go into the smelly details of that operation but we realized we had not noticed a notch in the casing and had basically almost blocked the poor thing… anyhow IT NOW WORKS and we can take a macerator apart and put it back together in our sleep… good thing too as we will have to do it AGAIN when we find a new impeller!

We woke up this morning and the wind was really up…. More importantly the direction was changing to the west and that meant we had zero protection in that anchorage… we had to get out and make our move to Hope Town a few days early… so the stress of not being in position to catch our flight to the UK on Wednesday is now over… all we need to do is to get a ferry to Marsh Harbour, a taxi to the airport, a puddle jumper from Bahama Air to Nassau and British Airways to Heathrow….piece of cake!

So we are really back to the point where we turned around last year… we are tied up to a dock in Hope Town marina with power on board while we are away so we will not lose all the goodies in our freezer…

We gave Soli a nice fresh water rinse, a bit of a luxury at .25 a gallon, but she deserves it, launched the dinghy (which did not need pumping exceptionally…. must have gotten scared with all our talk of replacing it!) did some laundry… and went to our favourite restaurant for supper…Wahoo with a mango sauce… now remember this is the kind of fish which the guys caught. We had three, last year, as well as a mahi mahi when we went deep sea fishing…we are looking forward to going again with Truman on Lucky Strike and this time Jacqueline is coming… not staying behind and reading “The other Boleyn girl”! .

So here we are nicely and safely tucked away, the wind is howling outside but we are cozy and David is doing some business…. The Blackberry is working very well so he is 100% in touch with the office…. I also changed the sim card in my phone to a Batelco card so calls will be less expensive… Alan (Agro-Hall’s proud agent) tested it last night at one AM with great success….’tis like being married to a doctor!!!
We would never dare complain about Olga (a tropical depression) which is sending us these strong winds when we hear about the snow expected in Montreal tomorrow…35 cms… we hope Catherine and Mike have no problem driving to Montreal on Tuesday…try and leave early guys!!!
I have been trying to post pics... but keep getting kicked out of the wifi connection sorry!!!!