Day 268, Monday March 17th
Daylight savings time is reeking havoc on Dawson’s ability
to get up for the Chris Parker weather show on SSB. Normally we just woke up at 6 in the morning
but now our bodies don’t want to wake until 7 and that is too late. It seems sinful to set an alarm. Oh what to do.....
We want to go north about 20 miles to Governors Harbour, but
the anchorage there will not protect us from the westerly winds expected on
Tuesday so we opt to go further north to Hatchet Bay. This is about a 40 mile sail with the winds
mainly behind us. We manage to sail wing
on wing for a chunk of the trip. Wing on
Wing is when the jib is out on one side of the boat and the main on the other side. It keeps the boat nice and flat which is
comfortable to be able to do things during the day while undersail.
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| Sailing wing on wing |
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| The guilty cockpit drain! |
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| Entrance to Hatchet Bay, Alice town, Eleuthera |
The sail is absolutely beautiful, we are play some dominoes
along the way but tragedy strikes, one of the tiles falls to the floor and
Julie watches it as it jumps up and does a swish into the cockpit drain, never
to be seen again. It was like slow
motion watching it say it’s final good-byes.
We continue the game not knowing which tile has left us. Once we discover which tile is missing the
whole set will become garbage, but until then we can keep using it. Dominoes is quite popular here so we will
have to buy another set.
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| Narrow entranceway |
We find the entrance to the harbour by around 3:00. It is a narrow channel cut through the rocks
into a deep saltwater pond. One of the
safest havens we have found, but with the waves behind us the surf in was a
little intimidating as the entrance is only about 90 feet wide which seems
narrow when you are in it. About 2 hours
after we anchored however a small freighter ship left by this narrow passage so
we dinghied over to watch. They handled
it like pros of course, but not a lot of room for maneuvering.
Upon arriving in the anchorage we see the red boat Miraki,
Lucy and John which we have not seen since the C&D canal north of
Annapolis. This is also the boat that we
had taken a picture of getting trapped in one of the Erie Locks and had turned
sideways. We were happy to see them and
joined them for Happy Hour (sundown is getting too late now so we are back to
Happy hour) at a bar called “Da Spot”.
Once there we also meet up with Jim, their son who is visiting and had
been surfing on the Atlantic side. With
Jim are the crew of Meridian Chad and Drew who we have also been seeing on and
off and had spent time with in the north part of the trip. Oriel C, Deb and Glen were also there so it
was like old home week.
By 7:00 we head back to the mothership but swing over to
check out the fishing boats at the town docks.
The have barrels of stone crab, which Julie was going to write off as a
dinner option as crab is too much work.
Dawson however asked a few questions and turns out it is just the claws
they harvest so they have barrels of claws.
We ask if we can buy a pound and they say sure, but they are just
cooking them in a large pot in the middle of the boat. Come back in 20 minutes. So we swing by Miraki to see if they want
some and they are keen also. Dawson
swings back to get the crab and the guy does not even want to charge him the $8
he quoted us, but Dawson insists. How
nice but not necessary. A pound of crab
got us 3 large claws to share. Not a
huge amount but probably the Canadian food guide recommended amount. We dipped them in melted butter and it was
delicious. So glad we had investigated
the activity over at the docks.
We have a quiet evening of Kings cribbage of course and off
to bed.
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| Dawson eating stone crab claw |
Cheers
Julie and Dawson
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