Where was I….?

The adventure continues….
Sunday, January 25th, 2009
Where was I…oh yeah. David left for a few days and Sam and I filled our days with activities, bridge, volleyball and goofing off. Sam learned how to play Texas hold’em and beat the entire adult group by bluffing with a pair of 9’s (could be a future in that). Sam and I moved the boat over to the other side of town prior to the Griffey’s visit so we wouldn’t have to dinghy too far. Sam and I worked out our communication system and got it done with no problems. I was very proud of how Sam handled it, not worried at all.

Nancy, Charles, Vivian and Ross stayed at Regatta point. We did some snorkeling with Ross and Nancy (skinny people) shivering most of the time, but saw some cool stuff. We ended the trip on a good note with Charles doing the “alligator” on the dance floor at fish fry. The taxi cab driver came to pick us up and we pleaded with him to let us stay, thank goodness he did not relent. Thanks for coming to see us guys!

We left Georgetown on Thursday for Long Island. It was a fun trip since we left with around 20 other boats. David, of course, made it a regatta in his mind. We finally caught up to the Beneteau 40 that was plaguing us and got passed like we were standing still by a Catalina 42. One of our cruising buddies s/v Rio Dulce is a Katana 470 (catamaran). Absolutely beautiful boat. It started about an hour after us and reeled us in, but after it caught up, we held with it! We found out later he used his MOTOR to catch up with us. We also gleaned that catamarans don’t go up wind as well as Calibers. Score one of the monohulls! That is only thing they don’t do though, we are starting to turn to the “cat-side”

We are anchored in Thompson Bay, Long Island. Again, it is absolutely beautiful here. This is one of my favorites though. It is 70 miles long and about 1 mile wide, hence the name Long Island. We bit the bullet and rented a van yesterday with another family to tour the island. I was fortunate enough to drive the group around, which was cool since the steering wheel was on the other side and I was driving on the left. I only got yelled at once by my navigator (not David). The whole tour took 13 hours. It was a bit much to jam into a day, but well worth the $50 for the rental. We saw a Columbus Monument, the beautiful beaches of Santa Maria, some ruins of churches, some really old churches (circa 1800’s), a 1100 foot cavern that the Lucayan Indians used and one of the largest blue holes in the world. If you don’t know what a blue hole is, I will try to explain. This one in particular was 670 ft deep and about 100 yards across surrounded by a 30 ft cliff on three sides and a sandy beach on the other. They (people around the harbor) think it may have been a formed by a salt dome. It is very dramatic, you wade out about 2 yards and then it drops off to nothing. It almost make you dizzy to look down into it. It is a little frightening to think about what lives down there. We have heard lots of speculation from sharks and tarpon to enormous Jew fish. We only saw cute, smallish fish around the hole, thank goodness. I thought the best part was at the end when we swam over to the coral head and saw a Nassau grouper (my first) and then, lame as it is, a bunch of live sand dollars (another first).

Today we are recovering from yesterday’s extremely exciting excursion. We laid around in the morning, with the exception of Sam, he did school. Then we visited one of the Atlantic side beaches with awesome cliffs for a couple of hours. The amount of trash on the East sides of islands around here is very sad. Almost all of it is plastic, some glass and rubber. The most interesting find was a rusty old mine, minus the detonator.

We are lucky enough to have made some cruising buds with kids. These include 4 boats: Liberty, Rio Dulce, Got a Life and 3 at Sea. The kids are all between 8 and 13, one even has the same birthday as Sam. All of these kids are using Calvert home school like us. Some are further along than we are, they didn’t have a hurricane and a gulf crossing to contend with. Usually when one or more boats make a plan, they let everyone in on it and whoever wants to join in can. Here is a picture of us all spelling GEORGETOWN. This is a very nice life.

We will probably be heading for the Jimentos in a couple of days. They are to the south of Georgetown, west of here. They are not so populated and supposedly full of fish and lobster. We shall see….