Dec. 11-14 For the next few days, it was time to clean and polish the boat and do general chores. It is nice not having to deal with teak decks and trim. The stainless steel rails all around the boat are easy to polish. When I was at Home Depot in Ft. Lauderdale, I picked up a cherry tomato, parsley, and cilantro plant with soil and a planter. This now was out on the aft deck and slowly getting used to the Bahamas weather. It is nice growing something at sea. I still have my small Maine garden planter going but the only thing alive is the small pine tree. I hope to keep that alive till next summer. We also went in to Staniel Cay to do emails and get reaquainted with the locals and John went to Batelco to see why our Bahamas cell wasn’t working. Turns out the phone was old technology and they hadn’t bothered to tell our friend, Joe. John bought a new phone and we were able to call the family again. The weather was delightful and swimming was the order of every day. We helped our new friends by filling their boat’s water tanks, had them to dinner and got a wonderful homemade bread in return. What a deal! Fresh water down here costs 30-50 cents a gallon.

Dec. 15 Over the last few years when we have been down here, we have worked with an American couple who have an afterschool program at Black point just south of here. They live in Florida when they are not “on island”. When we were in Ft. Lauderdale, they came over and gave us 10 big boxes of school supplies to take to Black Point for them. It was a our pleasure to be a cargo ship for them. Today was drop off day so we motored down to Black Point, anchored, and transfered everything into the dinghy. The wife of the minister, who helps the children too, was there to greet us and receive the boxes. we spent the rest of the day at Lorraine’s Cafe doing emails, having lunch and admiring her happy new 4 month old baby, Joshua. She is 43 and has grand children so this one was a complete surprise! As we headed back north to the Staniel Cay area, we decided to go and anchor behind Thunderball Grotto island because it would give us protection from an upcoming storm. We found a nice deep sandy spot to drop the anchor out of the wild currents that swirl in that area behind the islands.

Dec.16-18 Luckily, we were the first to get into position because, over the next several days, other boats got the same idea. It was still calm and sunny so we could swim as long as it was slack tide. One day, we took the dinghy to nearby Sampson Cay to see what they had in their little grocery store. The big excitement was learning we could get WIFI set up on the boat so we could do emails and go on the internet without having to go ashore and pay $10 a pop. What a big difference a few years makes. Being able to get weather information anytime was a big plus too. More chores were done like cleaning up John’s deck and filing his papers, adding new movies to our movie list, writing Xmas cards, working on menus for the various guests coming later in the season. Late in the evening on the 18th, the storm started to pick up so we decided to take turns staying up during the night to make sure the anchor was holding, no one was going to hit us or vice versa. The wind was good and strong but not what had been forcast. We did get a few rain squalls but they were short. The sailboat next to us bounced all night and we were so glad to be on our heavy trawler.

Dec. 19 The storm continued most of the day but gradually got better because the wind went around more to the NW where we were more protected. I packed for my trip to Greenwich where i will be with my mom for xmas. John will stay put and guard Windermere. I return on Dec. 28...