Georgetown – 3 miles in dinghy
We have been experiencing what is called a “norther”. This is a collision of fronts which results in gale force north-east winds that sends boats scurrying for cover. The temperature does not actually drop much, but the wind and cloud cover makes it feel cool, so cruisers typically close themselves into their boats and disappear from the ocean scene until the norther blows over, which typically happens after two or three days. Tomorrow it is forecast to die out in the afternoon, which would make it the third day. What’s expected to follow is four to five days of settled, beautiful weather, which will be great for our passage to Long Island.
This weather pattern happens over and over again throughout the winter months in Bahamas as the cold fronts travel southward from Canada and the US.
I had a surprisingly productive day today as I decided it was finally time to make bread. We brought two large containers of flour from home with the expectation I’d regularly be baking up loaves, but the reality has been much different. The busy cruising schedule, cool days on the ICW, hours spent motoring on a vibrating boat (tough for dough to rise properly) and ready access to bread from stores (not necessarily good bread…) has meant I just haven’t gotten around to it. So today, after dropping Ana and Stella off at the Snappy Turtle restaurant bar just around the corner (avoiding the windy side of Elizabeth Harbour), I got to work making bread. And since I didn’t have my regular bread recipes with me, I pulled up two on the internet; one for Bahamian Johnny cake and one for regular white loaves. I was happy with the result and Stella just loved the Johnny cake, which is a dense, non-rising bread full of butter and reminiscent of a scone.
I picked up the girls after a couple of hours and Ana finished up her annual Newport strategic planning meeting on the boat. She had hoped to use the wifi at the Snappy Turtle, but it started flaking out so used her phone data instead and locked herself in the v-berth for a couple of hours. During this time, Stella chose “Harvest Moon” as a song for us to learn and I picked it out on the uke, she memorized the lyrics, and we got it to a pretty good state, but my fingertips felt like mush by the end of it. Stella has always been a fantastic singer; I am terrible, and not that great at uke either, but we managed to put together a decent enough version of it. We’ll practice more tomorrow, and maybe add another song to our repertoire so we can do talent night at the Chat ‘N’ Chill.
Since we already had fresh bread, we decided to go whole hog and make conch fritters and plantains. Stella and I got to work with the conch tenderizing, vegetable chopping, oil boiling, ingredient consolidation, and put together a fine meal for us to enjoy in the comfort of the cabin, protected from the pulverizing weather. Instead of a quiet few hours on the boat to leisurely digest our meals, at 6:30, after a rapid cleanup, we were in the dinghy, in the blackness and waves and light rain, motoring through the awful weather back to the Snappy Turtle so the girls could watch the Buffalo Bills/Kansas City Chiefs football game. The original plan was for them to take the dinghy themselves, but it was just too rough for that so I chauffeured.
I really do not like football. I don’t mind saying it. I get no enjoyment from watching four hours of shitty and stupid commercials, punctuated occasionally by hordes of grown men bashing into each other, patting each other’s bums, doing funny dances, but mostly just standing around doing nothing for hours waiting for their few precious minutes to get out on the field. Look, I know a lot of people love football, and it is nothing less than a religion in the US, but it is not a great sport to watch. I don’t much like any sports, but at least with rugby or soccer or hockey or tennis or basketball or even cricket, there’s something happening most of the time other than commercials. Notice I didn’t mention baseball? That’s even worse to watch than football.
I watched some of the game but got bored quickly. I dug through a library of books Ana pointed me towards, stashed around the corner from the bar, and found an ancient copy of Jimmy Cornell’s “World Cruising Routes” which kept my attention for at least an hour as I read through all the recommended routes and safe months for passages between the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Europe, envisioning future blue water adventures on SeaLight. I went for a walk around the resort. I sat on a rock. I looked up at the sky. I returned to the library and found a Time magazine on the history of Lego, which I read back to back. Fascinating.
Finally, with just a few minutes left in the game and the score nearly tied, the girls inexplicably decided it was time to leave. I don’t know if they were feeling sorry for me or what, but they didn’t have to leave on my account. I wasn’t complaining. I like boredom. It happens so infrequently in our lives these days. Some say mobile devices have conquered boredom, but I think they’ve really just conquered inquisitive thought and idea generation.
We motored our way back through darkness, feeling our way, avoiding reefs, avoiding boats, avoiding the shoreline. Once in the safety of SeaLight’s cabin, Ana found a three minute trial version of an online sports channel so they girls got to see Kansas City score a field goal and pull ahead of the Bills, just before it ran out. I think that probably made a lot of people in Ontario and New York sad, but they will recover. And like the Toronto Maple Leafs are fond of saying, “Next year is THE year!”
Which makes me wonder, why are they called the Maple Leafs and not the Maple Leaves? I better grab my device.
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