We began the day with the lovely sunrise in Leaf Cay before we motorsailed to Georgetown.  For many cruisers, this is THE destination.  They arrive in the Bahamas in November or December and shoot down here as fast as they can in order to spend the winter season here.  Above is one of the many anchorages available, although we hear that the number of cruisers here is down from previous years.  Georgetown is 125 miles SE of Nassau and 350 miles from Miami.

We are here for several reasons.  First, we need to provision with some fresh food and a few other items we have either run out of or didn’t know we’d need.  Our forwarded mail has been here for over a week and we need to pick that up from Exuma Market.  We are also almost out of propane which we use for our outside grill and our stove/oven.  We have two tanks to get filled and have tried to find a place since we got to Bimini.  Actually, we even tried in Miami, but without a car it was difficult.  We were told it is “easy to get propane in the Bahamas.”  Guess what?  It isn’t.  This is our 18th stop and it was only available in Nassau and Farmer’s Cay.  We were only in Nassau for one night and left the next morning.  There wasn’t time to get to the propane filling place, but again it was going to be “easy” to find it.  The next cay with propane was Farmer’s Cay, but the person with it, Little Jeff, wouldn’t sell us any as he had it saved for other people.  We need to get fuel, although we have been getting it in jerry cans along the way.  Finally, we have to get cash from a bank.  We haven’t seen an ATM or Bank since Bimini.  Very few places, other than marinas, take credit cards, debit cards or checks.  We ran out of cash a week ago, and luckily our friends on Ultra, JoAnne and Bill, loaned us enough cash to get by until now.  We haven’t spent much money, other than fuel and mooring balls ($10 a night in Farmer’s Cay and one night in Warderick Wells for $20).  

As we came into the harbor, our friends Mark and Joanne from Avalon, who were traveling with us from Bimini to Black Point, called us on the VHF radio.  They have been here for several weeks with guests who flew in to see them.  They came over to our boat along with Bill and JoAnne from Ultra for snacks, drinks and a reunion.  It is great to see them again, but after their guests leave this weekend they have to go back to Staniel Cay to pick up another guest.  Hopefully they’ll be able to catch up with us again when we go back north toward the Abacos.

We will probably stay here for a couple of weeks.  We did make one major mistake.  Although we are not using excessive amounts of water, we make it frequently for our tanks and in jerry jugs for our traveling companions.  However, Mark thought the tanks in both hulls were full, but it turns out our two tanks in one hull are empty and we are using the tank in the other hull.  (There is no gauge on the tanks to tell how much is in them.  You find out the water is gone when it stops coming out of a faucet.  In other words, we’ll be out of water soon.  Water is free here.  You just bring jerry jugs (five gallons) to a faucet in the city. We have two jugs.  That’s a lot of trips.  You can’t make water in Georgetown as there are a lot of boats here and they are all emptying their toilets directly into the water.  Sounds horrible, but that’s the way it is done here.  The currents carry the waste out so the water looks crystal clear and the watermaker probably does get all the germs out, but it’s not worth taking the chance of getting sick.  Therefore, Mark and I will probably take a trip a few miles away or maybe go out onto Exuma Sound and float around for awhile to make water and get our three tanks full, as we thought they were until today.

We hadn’t planned on coming to Georgetown quite this soon.  JoAnne needs to be here for a ham radio operator’s test in two weeks.  So, we were planning on getting down here a week or so before that, not two.  However, we heard there is going to be 50 kt winds passing through the southern Bahamas on Saturday and we needed to find a protected area to anchor.  We left Rudder Cay, which had really great caves and coral where we could snorkel because the protection was not good.   We didn’t stay in Leaf Cay yesterday which is next to Lee Stocking Cay for the same reason. Three times a week a marine research center on Lee Stocking offers free tours of their facility.  They study queen conch shells and other marine life and we had hoped to stop there.

We left Leaf Cay this morning at 8 am for the 30+ mile sail to Georgetown.  With winds around 15 kts at a perfect beam reach (90 degree angle from us) we sped along between 7 and 8 kts, which for us is very fast.  The water was almost smooth out on Exuma Sound and it was a great sail.  As we approached the cut to enter Georgetown, a squall approached us.  We lowered our sails and waited.  One squall passed on either side of us and we just had a minute or two of rain.  Then we entered the cut to look for an anchorage.  We have one chosen to go to if the 50 kt winds are really coming.  Weather predictions here aren’t any better than they are in the States.

We passed several anchorages and stopped at Sand Dollar Beach.  The city of Georgetown is across a large bay.  We’ll have to dinghy in tomorrow morning as the weekly propane sale is at 11 am.  We’ll also go to the grocery store, buy a wifi prepaid ticket, pick up our mail, stop at the bank and look around the town.  There is no good snorkeling around here and we don’t plan on doing any of the numerous activities, such as playing cards, playing volleyball, making crafts, etc.  I’m sure we’ll enjoy ourselves, however.  We’ll find something to do and if not, we do have a large library of books.  Lying in the hammock in the 80 degree sunshine while reading a book sounds fine to me.

The sun we saw early this morning in Leaf Cay was equally beautiful when we watched it set tonight in Georgetown.