Today we moved over to the mooring field in Spanish Wells from the anchorage a few miles away at Royal Island.  While the anchorage in Royal Island is pleasant, there is no place to get off the boat, other than an area where workmen are building a resort and condo development.  There are only six mooring balls available at $15 a night and one is already taken by a catamaran for several months.  We were lucky to get the ball off to the left by ourselves as the other mooring balls are quite close together.

We have only been in a handful of mooring fields.  Some have been extremely difficult to get into, such as the ones in Little Farmer’s Cay, and some have been relatively easy.  Here’s how it works.  I position myself on the bow of the boat with a long boat hook in my hand.  Before we get to the mooring field, we set up two lines coming from the front of each hull.  One of these black ropes is showing in the photo.  We already have a bridle (white rope running through anchor in photo) which would work on the mooring ball, but we like stronger lines.  Next, Mark s-l-o-w-l-y brings us up to the ball.  Since he can’t really see it from back at the helm, I give him hand signals to guide him up to it. We’ve tried using walkie talkies, but it’s one more thing to do so hand signals seem to work best.  This mooring ball has a small ball with a number on it and a very large ball connected to a weight on the bottom of the water.  I grabbed the mooring ball line with the boat hook and passed one of the our lines from the boat through the eye and back to a cleat.  After securing that to one bow cleat, I grabbed the other line, ran it through the eye and brought it back to the other bow cleat.  There was no wind and no current when we came into the mooring field and we quickly got the mooring ball attached to our lines.  We are on mooring ball “8,” i.e. the “ 8 ball.”

While we had explored Spanish Wells a little yesterday, today we took the bikes ashore and looked around more.  We returned to Food Fair, the large grocery store, and this time I couldn’t resist buying a few treats.  I finally found red Tootsie Pops and as the picture shows I was very happy. I ran out of the ones I bought months ago.  Obviously these were Christmas candy because there were red and green suckers in a green bag with a wreathe on it.  However, they weren’t on sale.   There were  seven red pops and nine green pops and the bag cost $5.  Being desperate for a Tootsie Pop fix, I bought the bag.  Mark is still on the lookout for Sweet Tarts.  We didn’t know what to expect for fresh fruits and vegetables in The Bahamas but have always been able to find them.  The Food Fair and Pinders Grocery both have excellent selections and prices in most places have been reasonable. 

This is one of the prettiest towns we’ve been in as well as having the most stores for shopping and the best grocery store we’ve seen so far.  There is a gift store here where Bahamian crafts are sold.  They carry shell jewelry and other items.  We bought a beautiful conch shell lamp, a conch horn with a mouthpiece in it, and some gifts to bring back to Minnesota.  This is the first time in all of the places we’ve stopped where we were even tempted to purchase anything.