Life on TWINS 

5-15-18

This Second Leg of our Bahamas trip has been windier than expected and finding less roll (ocean swells) protection in the anchorages than we like.  Today we are finally in a nice hole and expect to be here a week (or more?) as the weather forecast predicts another week of high winds, 15-25knots.  Today hours has been a series of lightening, thunder and rainstorms.  A monsoon to us.  So it should only get better....

This island, Prime Cay, is about 2/3’s of the way down the Exumas chain.  The entrance was done at high tide, at 9am, since the entrance area is charted at only 1 meter depth.  We came in to this protected hole at 1.1 foot above mean for the first high tide of the day without any issues finding 9 feet to anchor in with lots of room.  The bottom is sand and forgiving, hopefully!  We will sound it out with the dingy once the storms pass.

Like too many islands in The Bahamas this one is private having been bought by an electrical contractor from California.  It’s one of a number of Islands (cays) they purchased.  They plan to develop the nearby island into a resort investing $75 million and are already running bulldozers over it for a golf course.

On the other side of us is Goat Cay, developed by Tim McGraw and Faith Hill as their getaway resort.  Not to mention David Copperfields place we passed yesterday (rentable for $50,000 a day) or Jonny Depps Island before that.  It is definately changing the face of “cruising the remote islands”.

We seem to have provisioned to avoid any shortages of either alcohols or foods.  As usual, we make a meal often having leftovers to accumulate into interesting meals.  But we do eat well.  The freezers are still loaded!

Our fresh food gardening experiment has worked pretty well.  I planted a bin of lettuce seeds before leaving from 4 different variety seed packs, so maybe 20 different kinds of edible greens.  As they came up I did some transplanting and have been able to have a lot of fresh salads.  I’ve already replanted the lettuce bins twice.  Next trip we’ll add some spinach to the mix.

Onboard we have yellow grape tomatoes, cherry tomatoes and a larger variety, the last one planted which has yet to give us a red fruit...three green fruit are in process.  Parsley, sage, rosemary, & thyme are growing for herbs along with two large basil plants and one chives.  I cut the chives down and plant romaine lettuce alongside.

TV has been working fine and I’m getting my nightly fix of the Stanley Cup Playoffs via satellite service.  Tampa and Las Vegas?  That balances out the regular maintenance, replacing parts and changing oils.

One of the best additions on TWINS has been the reverse osmosis watermaker.  We make water every 3-5 days and at 30 gallons per hour it gives more water than needed running about 3 hours.  We wash stuff regularly actually wasting water.  It is totally the opposite of previous cruising where we lived miserly lives of conservation!

But the miserly life is ingrained.  After 45 days out, we have only been to a marina one night.  That was to check into customs, get our cruising permit and give them $300 for the privilege. We have picked up a mooring ball a couple of times in the Exumas Land & Sea Park though and joined them as a support fleet member, financially supporting conservation and clearing some trails.

Picture us knee deep in the water somewhere, beach-combing for shells, driftwood and sea glass.....enjoying the sandwiches and itinerant life.