No worries, mon!

We seem to be adjusting well to island life. After a long weekend of lassitude (nothing is open over the holiday weekend), we pulled ourselves together for a day of running errands: grocery shopping, dumping trash, filling our water tanks, doing laundry, applying for a reciprocal ham license for Dean, and all the things we cannot accomplish on a deserted island.

Shortly after sending off a blog that claimed we were heading to the Exumas first thing in the morning, we were overcome by our accomplishments today and decided to stick around Nassau one more day. We haven't had the Bacardi Factory tour, after all, and what's the hurry? The iguanas will still be waiting on Allan's Cay when we get there, and the ruins of a bigtime drug smuggler's lair, complete with plane wreck in the harbor, will still be on Norman Cay a few days later.

Lest you think we actually accomplished very little today, let me tell you what it means to run errands, island style. Note that this is a partial list.

It rained last night, so first I had to pump water out of the dinghy--or, actually, first I had to dive into the harbor to rescue the hand pump after it bounced out of the dinghy when I tried to drop it there. Then we had to gather our trash and two loads of laundry, dinghy to a nearby marina, climb up a ladder to the dock with our burdens on our backs, pay the marina to take the trash, walk half a mile to a laundromat, wait for all that to wash and dry, walk back to the dinghy, load it up, and motor back to Delilah to unload and eat lunch.

While we were on the boat, a newcomer to the harbor hailed us for advice on how to stop his runaway motor. We didn't have to shout back suggestions for very long, as he had put out an absurd amount of chain for such crowded conditions in ten feet of water (Dean will have to explain one's swing radius another day, as it requires a knowledge of trigonometry), his boat was swinging dangerously close to us anyway. He didn't seem to notice until we were about a foot or so away from him.

This event caused us to realize that the harbor had become quite crowded lately, so we scrapped the plan to up anchor and motor over to the marina for fuel and water. There was a good chance that our spot would be taken when we returned, and since our ground tackle has held remarkably well so far, why mess with it?

We left the other sailor to sort out his anchoring problems, and reloaded the dinghy with four five-gallon jerry cans for water. We went back to the dock, locked our jugs to the dinghy with a bike chain, walked a mile to the nearest grocery store, suffered sticker shock (they have a ton of items you would find in the States, but Pop Tarts, for instance, cost $5.29 for a small box), lugged the groceries back to the dock (this last step would not have been necessary if we could figure out the bus routes), loaded those into the dinghy, which, thanks to a falling tide, was now five feet lower than the dock, filled the five-gallon jugs, handed those down into the dinghy, motored back to the boat, handed everything up three feet from the floor of the bobbing dinghy to the deck of Delilah, put the groceries away, fashioned a water funnel out of an old apple juice bottle, poured each of the jugs into our water tank, and then loaded them back into the dinghy to repeat the procedure t!
wo more times.

Are you ready for the math? A gallon of water weighs 8.337 pounds. A jerry can of water weighs 41.685 pounds. We filled four cans 3 times, which means that we (Dean) lugged 500.28 pounds of water back to the boat this afternoon.

Along the way, at the dinghy dock, some other guy collared Dean and made him take a boat battery off the dock and put it in his (the stranger's) dinghy. We still don't know why the guy couldn't do it himself, but Dean was too shocked to do anything but comply.

But I did not mention my most important errand of the day: epicurean research. To that end I can confirm that neither of the Dunkin' Donuts stores in Nassau carries vanilla kreme doughnuts. The pineapple-filled was a risky second choice, but it was quite good.

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