It has been a particularly harsh winter along the eastern coast of the US, so no surprise that a 1,000 miles south in the Bahamas the weather has also been a bit challenging. There have been very strong winds clocking around the entire compass rose, so that each week we end up needing to find a safe anchorage that has good protection from all directions. There are only a handful of safe places that fit this bill, and if you don’t get there early there won’t be room for even one more boat! Everyone is looking for a hiding place these days.

But I don’t expect that anyone enduring an East Coast winter in the US will have much sympathy for us. Still, it’s been quite challenging to stay safe, and that has caused me a fair amount of stress! As our weather router warned us this morning, March is going to go out like a lion, not a lamb!

And yet, there are still idyllic spots in between the weather fronts. We did some shelling while hiding from the weather in Pipe Creek, near Compass Cay. Our most exciting find is the tulip snail (right side, center)!  They are a predator of little conchs.

At Compass Cay you can swim with the nurse sharks that they encourage by feeding them each time the fisherman are cleaning fish or beheading lobsters.  If bull sharks or lemon sharks come near the dock, someone chases them off. The first day we were there there were almost as many young children in the water as there were sharks.  I wish I had a photo of that!  Well, in six weeks, I should have a photo of our 30 yr. old son Rob playing in the water with them!

Big Major’s Spot is very popular, so you can never be the only boat at anchor here, but it’s not a safe place in these endlessly clocking winds, so we weren’t there for long this year. The pigs come running at the sound of a dinghy motor. There are baby pigs this year, and they are growing fast. They doubled their size in the two weeks between our visits!

I was so busy taking photos of Bob with the babies, looking through the lens, I didn’t see the 800 lb. mama come right up to the boat and stick her head into the boat, almost bumping me with her big snout!  Perhaps she thought the camera might be tasty!  I almost shrieked!

We hid for several days in the Exuma Land and Sea Park at Warderick Wells, where we spotted these ramoras who came to check out the vegetable scraps we had thrown overboard.

Also at Warderick Wells, we spotted a flock of egrets on one of the small cays, and we startled them into flight with our approach!  Back at home we tend to see individual egrets, not entire flocks.

On top of challenging weather, we have also had plenty of little problems with electronics and gear. In one hard blow at Staniel Cay our anchor got stuck under a limestone ledge, and then was damaged getting it out. It is now impressively ruined! Luckily we have an equally large spare on board. This boat has more spare parts than food and clothing. You can always wear dirty clothes, or eat canned soup for days, but replacing engine parts, or electronic parts, or needing an anchor is not something you can do without even for day!

One of the challenging equipment failures during this trip is the loss of my iPad, close to three weeks ago. Not only does it have a couple of highly important navigational aids that we rely on, but it also is the hotspot for our computers, and my library of books and knitting patterns and cooking recipes (this is a HUGE loss!). While my iPad is still under warranty, I have no way to send it back to the US for replacement. Since there is no place to buy a new one down here, we have ordered one online through our older son back in the US. The iPad is being delivered to Watermaker’s airline in Florida, and they fly people and equipment to many of the little airstrips on various cays in the Exuma chain. Our deliver will happen later this week at Staniel Cay, a good choice for us since we can easily walk to the airstrip from the harbor. We didn’t want to add a taxi ride (often a golf cart taxi) to the expense of shipping by charter plane!

As I write this, we have the new iPad!  I have my recipes back (whew!), my knitting patterns, and Bob is currently re-loading the Garmin Blue Charts!  Hopefully this is the end of such big challenges.  We came down here to relax!

Our winter in the Bahamas is well under way, and even our first guest, our younger son, Chris, has come and gone already.  Bob and I were thrilled to see him right on the heels of his trip to Thailand.  He showed us wonderful photos and videos and told us so many great tales.  He met people from all over the world, mostly young people who are taking off even more time than he is.

We used our week together to show Chris some of our favorite cays in the Exumas, which naturally included Allen Cay with the wild iguanas, the Land and Sea Park at Warderick Wells, and Big Major’s Spot where the wild pigs swim out to you to beg as you dinghy in to shore.  This year there are baby pigs, and they are adorable!  The big pink Mama pig swam out to us and three little piglets waded into the water and cried for her to return!

 The lovely beach at Hawk’s Bill Cay

Pandora at anchor in Warderick Wells….

We visited one new spot with Chris called Hawk’s Bill Cay.  It is a less visited place with beautiful white beaches.  We ended the week at Staniel Cay where Chris could get a flight back to Nassau. Chris and Bob snorkeled into Thunderball Grotto together, and then we had a farewell dinner at Staniel Cay Yacht Club. It was a lovely time, all in all.

We walked to the little airstrip on Staniel last year, but this was the first time we actually saw the flight procedure!  The gate is an outdoor gazebo, and there is a woman who shows up about a half hour before take off to check people in for the flight on her clip board.  That is the extent of security.  The plane lands and she puts the passengers on board according to weight (using her judgment!  No one had to ‘fess up!), while the pilot stores everyone’s baggage in the nose of the plane.  Then all the onlookers are shooed off the rough limestone airstrip and the plane departs.  We miss Chris terribly now.  Hope we can get enough bandwidth at some point to skype with both Rob and Chris.

We’ve had quite a bit of excitement on this trip.  We’ve seen big sharks at every cay we’ve visited.  Last year we didn’t see sharks until we got south of Georgetown. Chris got some great footage of a big nurse shark right at Pandora’s stern.  While nurse sharks are harmless, we have also seen some large lemon sharks this year.  It makes us take stock pretty carefully before going for a swim!

Somehow a little gecko got on board with us for several days.  He was living in the main head (nauticalese for bathroom).  I’m certain we each took showers for days without knowing he was there, but once we did come face to face, he was traumatized by us, and I was terrified of him!  Bob and Chris were tempted to let him stay.  Bob seemed to think he could live off fruit flies!  Luckily for me, he is now ashore in the Land and Sea Park, and I hope he is happier there!

Yesterday a US Coast Guard rescue helicopter showed up right in our little anchorage off of Staniel Cay.  It did some fancy maneuvers for almost an hour around dusk.  It was amazing to watch! We imagined the pilot to be about 24 years old, and he could hover that big beast in a tight spot right off our port. He lowered the helicopter until it was right over the water, throwing up a wide circle of spray.  I’d love to know what they were doing and why they came to Staniel Cay.

There have been other excitements as well.  A Canadian couple we met last year got into some trouble in Cuban waters last week.  They ran aground on a reef off the northern coast of Cuba and were stuck pounding on this reef for over 24 hours before Cuban authorities came to help them.  Luckily they were in contact with other boats and the US Coast Guard (who could not help them at that location).  All ended well, but it must have been such a traumatic experience.  This morning we heard that the Bahamian Coast Guard (BASRA) has discovered there are foreign boats that have not properly checked in to the Bahamas, so they are now conducting ‘board and search’ missions on random boats in harbors.  We have all the proper documentation, but I sure hope we don’t get boarded!

It’s been a good couple of weeks for getting some other things under way as well.  I will write about that shortly.  I am paricularly happy to have had a couple of calm days to get my tapestry loom warped and even start weaving!  I’m having a lot of fun with those circles!  I thought I could do some weaving today, but we have strong westerly winds that are kicking up quite a rukus in this harbor.  I think we will head out shortly for a short sail to Cambridge Cay and a calmer anchorage.  Farewell Staniel!

This is the sun that set on my father’s remains on his first evening traveling the Gulf Stream.

May all the dolphins, turtles, and sailfish, and all the creatures of the warm Gulf Stream sing you home….