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I’m baaaack!

We arrived in Nassau last Saturday afternoon. This time around, “we” is me, Dave and our friend Ian, who is with us for a couple of weeks. We checked into our one-night hotel, then took the public bus to the ALIV store to get a data SIM card for our MiFi device. Then back to the hotel for very strong, fruity rum drinks, followed by dinner in their restaurant. We crashed early.

Sunday morning we met our taxi at 5:45am for the short trip back to the airport for our 7:30am flight to Great Harbor Cay. The short, 20-minute flight landed us just after 8am, where we were met by our pre-scheduled taxi. We were at the marina and on Indigo Lady by 8:30am. Back on our second home at last!

She was in good shape (relief!). We quickly set about opening her up, cleaning, sorting, unpacking, etc. We spent three days getting ready to head out of the marina. Lots of boat and tech chores were interspersed with bike rides to town for lunch (the first day when we were too tired to make food) as well as provisions and alcohol. Wednesday morning we settled up with the marina, bid them farewell, topped off our diesel and gas and started our multi-step trek toward Nassau.

As always, we are dependent on the weather and sea conditions. A big blow (wind only, no storms) was forecast for Friday-Saturday/Sunday, so we planned two stops along the Berry Islands chain. Wednesday night we stopped at Soldier Cay. Thursday we headed down to Frasers Hog Cay at the southern end of the chain. This is one of the few anchorages in the Berries with westerly protection and that’s the direction the winds are coming from. They started to kick up Friday afternoon and were very robust overnight, holding around 20-25 knots with gusts into the low 30’s. On a small boat like ours, this is very noisy, so I did not really sleep last night (sigh). Yesterday after breakfast we dinghied ashore, before the winds kicked up, for a walk on the beach and on part of what appeared to be an old trail, probably associated with the Berry Island Club Marina that closed down around 2017 or so. Today is too windy to do anything but stay inside. We’ll probably watch movies and play games. It’s a bit chilly to be outside. The air temp is only 60-degrees but there’s on heck of a wind chill. (Ya, I know, you in the north are thinking “poor babies, so cold for you.”)

We may be in warmer climes with beautiful scenery, but it hasn’t been all fun and games. Thus far Dave and Ian have had to trouble shoot a through-hull shut off for the port generator’s cooling system that had failed in the closed position, thus preventing cooling. Thankfully They got it into the permanently open position which should be fine until we get a replacement; my folks are bringing two with them when they come to join us next weekend. Dave and Ian have patched and re-patched a leak in our dingy. Our starboard generator, the one we finally got running last June after it being asleep for a year, conked out on us again while we were en route to Soldier Cay. We had stopped to reel in a fish and it wouldn’t restart after that. The helm display was reporting low voltage on the starting battery. So Dave engaged the cross ship cable and the port generator ran both motors, which is what we’d been doing this for a year, so it’s familiar territory. The boys tried to troubleshoot the source of the low voltage notification, because it turned out the battery was fine, but they found nothing. So of course once they put everything back together the generator started. That may sound like a good thing, but since root cause has not been ascertained and therefore cannot be permanently fixed, we have to expect that starboard generator may not start on any given day. It ran for a while on Thursday but then started acting like it wasn’t getting fuel, so again the port generator ran both motors. When we got to our current anchorage that afternoon they worked on that issue and tested both generators and starboard seemed happy. We’ll see once we head for Nassau tomorrow or Monday.

Once we get to Nassau, we hope to be able to anchor in West End Bay and do some diving and snorkeling before returning to the very busy Nassau Harbor Friday or Saturday. Ian flies home early Saturday afternoon and my folks fly in early that evening. We’ll spend a night or two in a marina slip to facilitate a big provisioning run and getting my folks onboard more easily. Then we plan to take the next weather window to continue to the Exumas. 

I plan to post something to my blog once a week. We’ll see how that goes 😉