Back in the Bahamas

Monday, April 16
Abraham's Bay, Mayaguana, Bahamas
N 22 degrees, 21.9 minutes
W 072 degrees, 58.7 minutes

We have made the long trek up to the Bahamas, and we are waiting in a beautiful but desolate outpost for weather. Indra is here with us, and Carapan and Crossroads have shown up as well, so we are in for a very social week.

We have been writing blogs faithfully since we left Puerto Rico last week. Because of a lack of Wifi, we'd been storing them all on the computer for a later date. And then yesterday, our computer just died. Those particularly eloquent blogs are gone forever.

Fortunately, Dean was great about backing things up to a hard drive, so we haven't lost everything permanently. We just can't look at our photographs, for instance, until we get a new computer.

So, what did we write in the lost blogs? I will try to recap.

Passage: We had our longest passage ever, three days (exactly 73 hours), from the east coast of Puerto Rico straight up to Grand Turk in Turks and Caicos. The weather was mild, we sailed most of the way, we caught a big mah mahi (also called a Dorado, Bryce), and I oohed and aahed over the beautiful stars and phytoplankton in our wake. We also kept up with Indra, which made that big ocean a little bit less lonely at three a.m.

Sailing at Night: It's scary, it's boring, it's draining, and we don't sleep well. But it is also peaceful, meditative, and awesome. We are just two people in a little boat, making our way across a deep ocean, with an even deeper, more mysterious sky above us. Scary, yes, but I always find myself out there at three a.m., wonder-struck and blissful and feeling very, very lucky.

Sunset: The third evening at sea, the wind had died and the ocean was flat, and we witnessed the kind of sunset that features prominently in religious literature and the covers of sailing magazines (sailing magazines being their own kind of religious literature.)

TCI: The water along the banks here is so clear that sailing between islands is like being in the deep end of a swimming pool that stretches from one horizon to the next. We did some excellent snorkeling, we got inked by squid and chased by a territorial triggerfish, and we discovered that the south side of Provo, with its murky water and heavy industry and unprotected anchorage in a southerly wind, is NOT the same place as Grace Bay on the north coast, where all the tourists go. We anchored off a reef for a day and enjoyed one more night of clear skies and endless stars.

Large mammals: While at anchor off Grand Turk, we spotted a whale, startlingly close to the stern of our boat, working the steep dropoff along the island's shelf.

Diving: or lack thereof. I had been planning to do some scuba diving here, in Mecca, until we realized that the price for it all was double what we would pay on every other island. We consoled ourselves with snorkeling. Along one reef at the edge of the banks, we were amazed by the sharp difference in temperature between the warm, shallow sand banks and and the chilly Atlantic Ocean. Through our maskss we could see the eddies and whorls of warm and cool water mixing.

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