George Town, Great Exuma Cay, Exuma, Bahamas
KORKZcrew is the blue dot on the map.
🎉🎉🎉 IT'S BATTERY DELIVERY DAY!!!! 🎉🎉🎉
Isn't that soooooo exciting?! 😜 (I mean, I set out to write a blog to document this trip, but I never promised it would actually be good, or even interesting. Now might be a great time to reconsider your decision to subscribe. 😂 )
We went into town twice today: once to pay for the battery shipment from Nassau, once to deliver Ron's makeshift bungee battery handles to Jamal to help him load the batteries so he can bring them out to KORKZcrew, and both times to get groceries as they became available. There have been some delays in getting shipments from Nassau to the grocery store, and they haven't had produce for several days, so we keep checking back to see what might be back in stock. I'm guessing it's weather related since everything comes in via ferry.
On our first trip into George Town, the dock was crazy crowded with tons of dinghies.
A lot of them were lined up to fill their jerrycans with water from the spigot on the dinghy dock. This is a free service offered courtesy of Exuma Markets. A jerrycan looks like this:
Sailboats typically carry several jerrycans of fresh water on board as most don't have large water tanks. I am not a sailor so I apologize if I am speaking out of turn here about water tanks and jerrycans, but please feel free to enlighten me in the comments as to what the "norm" might be.
Returning to KORKZcrew from George Town. You can see where we were anchored in proximity to the monument, high on the hill to the right.
So here's the moment you've allllll been waiting for . . . . drumroll please . . .
🥳🥳🥳🥳 THE BATTERY DELIVERY 🥳🥳🥳🥳
Perhaps we should all observe a moment of silence.
How about that amazing Jamal, picking up AND delivering twelve 70-pound batteries?!?!?!? We quickly realized it probably wasn't the BEST idea to leave all twelve of them on one side of the boat, so we dragged and pushed and lifted and heave-ho'd half of them to the opposite side. Now we are back in business . . . and balance. Well, almost. There's that small task ahead of us known as installation.😳 But we'll pull a Scarlett O'Hara and worry about that one tomorrow.
Skeet decided that today would be a good day to take the inflatable paddleboard over to Monument Beach. You've heard of standup paddleboards, but have you ever heard of KNEELup paddleboards?!?! See all the great things you learn on this blog?! (Please don't answer that.)
This is the very same beach where the water aerobic class is held three times a week, and I got a better look at this cute group yesterday morning, doing their thing. There's always a good number of people in attendance — around 20 — and I'm just so impressed with their willingness to not only exercise but to also get in that chilly water first thing in the morning. That is true commitment (that I don't have 😂).
Once Skeet returned, we went on a late-afternoon dinghy ride to visit a moored boat near Chat 'N Chill that belongs to a generous soul who offered to give us a small frying pan he no longer needed. We had made that request on the Morning Report because it's one of the things we'd failed to pack, and you just never know who might have an extra. When we asked him how to find his boat, he said something hilarious like "it's the ugliest one in the harbor". He had actually purchased the mooring last fall, and the boat came with it because it hadn't been worked on in something like eight years, and hadn't left the mooring in twelve. Quite the project boat to put it mildly, and he said he'll use it as a condo because it will probably never sail again. He seemed a bit overwhelmed, as if he'd bitten off more than he can chew, but he was also genuinely intrigued with the challenge ahead of him. One less challenge he now faces is having too many frying pans. You can always count on us to ease your load. 😂
As we continued our conversation, we learned that he’s from Beaufort, NC, and just like André, the electrical engineer from Montreal, he has sailed extensively through the Bahamas and Caribbean. And ALSO like André, he keeps coming back to George Town because of its cruiser community. He asked us if we had a “boat card” which it turns out is a business card people have printed that includes your boat name and contact information, and we of course did not, but he gave us his. In the cruiser community, you end up meeting so many people from so many different boats that it’s hard to keep them all straight, so they have cards made to hand out and exchange. Pretty cool. And who would want to forget meeting us?! I mean, let's be real. Consider "boat card" added to the KORKZcrew "to do" list.
We continued our dinghy cruise for a little while, which ranks up there as one of my favorite things to do — it's just simple, relaxing, and fun to take in all the sights and sounds. Steve tends to agree.
Comments