Long Island, Bahamas
KORKZcrew is the blue dot on the map.
Wishing a VERY happy birthday to my sister Knox and brother-in-law Dan who share the same birth date AND year! ❤️
This morning we decided to check out an anchorage about an hour south of us to see if it would be a good place to stay for the next several days as we are expecting dicey weather conditions. We didn’t see another boat for the entire trip which was interesti — only cloudy skies and beautiful blue water — yet another nice ride.
Once we'd made it further south, Ron didn’t feel like the anchorage was very well protected after all, so we did a u-turn and returned to Thompson’s Bay, and started to wonder if we'd "risked" losing a decent spot to anchor by leaving that morning. A significant number of boats had arrived since our departure earlier in the day, all of them presumably with the same idea of anchoring in the harbor to ride out the blow. Just as we entered the bay, Ron saw that the O’Kelly’s (from YouTube / SV Clarity) were anchored nearby! They had gone from George Town down to the Ragged Islands and must have just gotten to Long Island this afternoon as we didn’t see them yesterday. We’re wondering if they’re going to start thinking we're stalking them! Haha. After noticing several potential spots that would work well for KORKZcrew thanks to our shallow draft, we anchored temporarily in front of Tiny’s so we could run in, get a bite to eat, and figure out our overnight spot later.
It started out rather quiet at Tiny’s, with only a few other people there around 4:00 and a nice breeze that kept the mosquitos away. Beginning at 5, other dinghies began to come over from their sailboats and we ended up talking to so many nice people it was really overwhelming — in the best possible sense of the word. One family sat at an outdoor table right in front of ours and we struck up an interesting conversation. They are a family of four who’ve lived on a boat for over 10 years and if I understood them correctly, the boat is the only home their children have known. Their son was with them but their daughter was studying overseas in France. They’d heard us on the radio in George Town and gave us their boater’s card (business card). Their names are Frank & Jody Powers, and they live on a 39’ Beneteau sailboat. They were just incredibly friendly and shared all kinds of useful information about Long Island with us. They told us there’s a Cruisers’ Net on Long Island as well, and said it was super low key and only about 10 or 15 minutes long, but still informative. They shared info about an apparently really good market here and showed us where the dinghy dock is located. Jody also mentioned that if we needed anything any time we were traveling or anchored, no matter where we were, we could always ask for help on Channel 16, even if it’s just a question about our batteries or whatever. Great to know. While we were talking to them, another couple walked up and mentioned they’d heard us on channel 72 asking for help in George Town, and that they loved our boat. We’ve gotten so many compliments on KORKZcrew — Jody mentioned the boat too, saying that they’re usually like, "oh, there’s another power boat", but when they saw ours, they thought, "Now THAT boat has got character!" Or something like that. Really nice. Anyway, it turns out the son of the couple we were now talking to was the cute boy we’d heard on the Morning Report one morning in George Town as the guest moderator. The “regular” moderator named Mark on sailboat Puff had given Ezra a chance to be the moderator for that morning. Mark is the one who came and got 6 of our old batteries that still had a bit of life left in them, and had invited us over to his boat for cocktails as a thank you. During that get together, I’d told Mark what a nice thing he’d done for Ezra by validating him in that way . . . and there was Ezra at Tiny’s on Long Island with his mom and dad. Pretty crazy. Ezra’s dad told us that he was the one who’d put together the Kids’ Olympics at Chat 'N Chill one Sunday which we didn’t attend, but we had heard all kinds of rave reviews about how well organized and fun it was. He and his wife were really cute and humble and were asking us all about KORKZcrew.
We had been at Long Island a grand total of 3 days and already eaten at Tiny's twice 😂. Both times we sat at the high top you see on the beach, so we thought it only fair to start referring to it as "our table". 😜
That's good ol' KORKZcrew in the distance.
Then ANOTHER person came over and was chatting with us. She was from Belgium originally but has lived in the states for 20 years and was drawn to Skeet immediately, recognizing that he was on the spectrum because she’s worked with special needs kids as a teacher all of her professional life. It was so cool the way she interacted with him — you could tell she had a gift for connecting with people like Skeet. And don’t get me wrong — Skeet is very high functioning and easy to connect with, but she just had a knack about her that’s very hard to explain. Such a fun night.
Made our way back to KORKZcrew, and managed to find an excellent anchorage tucked way into the corner of that harbor. We even had one of the couples we had just met messaging us, basically giving us a virtual high five for being able to sneak up so close to shore and stay protected from the coming days of high winds.
