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Trip to George Town Wednesday March 18
We awoke early, and after a quick cup of coffee, we collapsed the Portabote and stowed it away, and then, last as always, we hauled up our anchor and began to head out.  Both Rotop and Renaissance had tried to go out Little Farmer’s Cut, but had turned back and gone down the Exuma Bank to Galliot Cut, a couple of miles away.  We made the decision that we could make it out the cut, and we carefully threaded our way out of Little Farmers and into the Exuma Sound.  What a rough ride that was.  We got out into the Sound, and the waves were extremely choppy, 4-5′ and coming from our port front quarter.  Oh how we both wished that we were under sail rather than under power, but there was nothing to be done for it.  We met up with Rotop and Renaissance as they came out of Galliot Cut, and shortly thereafter we received a hail on the radio from Renaissance, the chop was too much for them and they were going to turn in at Cave Cay Cut, which was about 2 miles down from Galliot and wait a day to see if the waves would subside. We initially hailed back that we would be doing the same at Rudder Cay Cut another 2 miles down, and that if they would like to meet us there they could come down the back side of the islands on the Bank to meet up with us. Michael hailed back to say that they were having some engine issues, and would probably stay at Cave Cay for the day.  With that thought in mind Brian and I continued on our course, with the thought that we would re-evaluate our plan as we approached the cut.  Shortly thereafter we hailed Rotop and we all decided we’d best push on as far as we could that day, and try to make it to Lee Stocking Island, another ~10 nm or so down from Rudder Cay.  We hailed Renaissance back to let them know of our plans, and agreed that we’d meet up with them in a few days in George Town, one way or another. We continued to plow along, with the waves (thankfully) subsiding slightly as the afternoon wore on.  We turned into Lee Stocking’s beautiful protected harbor at about 2:30 in the afternoon and threaded our way into the anchorage which was well protected from the wind.  Rotop pulled in shortly thereafter, but due to his deeper draft had to anchor further out than we had - too far to Kayak over really :(, but we chatted on the radio and all agreed that we’d be setting off for George Town as early as possible in the morning in concurrence with the tide so that we were not fighting additional current coming through the cut.
In the morning, before we departed, I thought it would be a good idea to take Martijn’s suggestion to switch out the halyard that we were using as our backup to the Genny Halyard/forestay as he was quite concerned about the amount of stretch in the halyard we’d doubled and attached to a bottle screw.  This should be an easy thing, take the new spare halyard we’d rigged for taking the stay down, and attach a messenger line to the end, then run that line down, leaving the messenger in place, and do the same with the stretchy spare halyard.  No problem right?  Easy, right?  The spare went off without a hitch, and I was able to quickly secure the messenger line into a continuous loop.  Yay!  I lead the staysail halyard forward and tensioned it as a back up to the genny halyard, and then unscrewed the bottle screw, losening the tension on the stretchy halyard, attached the messenger line and ran the halyard down, then ran it back up onto the new spare without a hitch.  YAY! I attached the halyard I was using to replace the stretchy halyard to the end of that messenger line and began to hoist the halyard up the mast and through the block… until the messenger line decided to jump off the track and between the block and the sheeve! Da** Da** and double Da**!!!  Bri and I tried to pop it free, with no success.  Nothing to be done but to get out the mast climber and go up and free the messenger line from the block and feed the halyard back down.  In the midst of this, the boat we’d anchored next to the night before - Luna Sea - was preparing to leave.  As we’d missed the weather that morning, I called over to them to ask what the conditions were, and Judy called back reassuring news, 10-15 knots with subsiding seas.  WHEW!  I thanked her and finished rigging up the mast climber.  Brian offered to go up, but as I said to him, my project, my problem - I’m going up!  Thankfully, the anchorage at Lee Stocking is so well protected that it was a very easy climb up the mast.  Brian spotted me and just as I got to the top, Amber Isle, the huge powerboat that had been anchored next to me hailed up to us.  Sandy and Valt took some great pictures of me at the top of the mast, which we’ll post as soon as we can upload them to the site.  Once up there, Brian cleated my safety off, and we quickly were able to run the halyard through at the top of the mast and back down so that we’d be able to secure it to the bottle screw.  Brian spotted me down, and we went to work securing this last bit and putting away our equipment.  We then pulled anchor - an hour and a half later than we had wanted to but were able to get out of the cut at Lee Stocking, and in much calmer seas, motored our way down to George Town. 
Getting into George Town (Elizabeth Harbor) is tricky, but fortunately for us, with our digitized Explorer Charts, we were able to thread ourselves through Conch Cut and over to Monument Beach, where we anchored right next to our friends on Ventoso and close by to Martijn, who had beat us there by an hour or more.  Relieved to be in George Town, we surveyed the map - realizing that we were far from any access to the town itself - a 2 mile LONG WET dinghy ride away, we decided that we’d lay low for the night (after a quick dinghy ride around the anchorage to say hello to a few folks and to meet a couple more people) and then would go over in the morning on Martijn’s boat with the Ventosos for a nice day ashore, and to take care of a few things like laundry and provisions.  The disappointing news was, however, that when we’d called the folks who were supposed to send the stay to Reggie Express, we found out that it had just shipped out on Wednesday, and therefore would definitely not be in George Town on Reggie’s Thursday delivery (they only fly in on Tuesdays and Thursdays)… so we’d definitely have to be here through the weekend and at least until Tuesday of the following week.
As it turns out, we were not so lucky that the shipment arrived as promised to Reggie by their Tuesday flight.  We contacted Reggie Express and they had not received the packages on Tuesday morning, so we decided we’d stay on board the boat for the day and do some other projects around the boat and go in on Wednesday to get a refill on our propane.  That night we were spoiled by a lovely trip over to the One Eyed Parrots, a couple from Louisville, KY who Brian had helped out with a SSB issue in the morning.  We had a delightful cocktail hour with them, where Leigh plied us with wonderful cheese and salami and some other tasty nibblies.  We were joined that night by another gentleman, Skip from Isolde II, who had also been helping out with the SSB problem, and it was great fun to meet up with some other boaters and hear some of the stories from their travels.  Both Skip and the Parrots (great name for the boat since that’s their last name) have become good buddies here in the anchorage, and it’s been really fun to get to know them over the past week.  We were lucky enough to catch a ride in on Wednesday with Glenlyon, Sue and Rodney, who were going ashore for the morning, so we didn’t have to pull up anchor to get across.  We had a lovely ride over with them, where Sue shared some great info she had on baking fresh bread, and when we got to the other side we were able to hop into our dinghy and run ashore to the Exuma Market docks.  I filled up the two water jugs we’d brought ashore with us, and then we popped over to the dock where we were supposed to be able to get a propane fill up.  Unfortunately, the gentleman who runs the propane service was ill and had had to go to Nassau to the hospital, so no propane… fortunately for us we were just filling up our second tank so not an issue, but one of our fellow boaters was completely out of propane!  We used our time ashore to run a few errands and to pick up a handful of groceries so that we could have some fresh veggies to go with dinner. We got back to the boat and received a confirmation email from both Reggie Express and our other vendor letting us know that they had received our packages and that they would be arriving in George Town the next day on Reggie’s Thursday flight.  That night we went ashore with a large group to a Rake and Scrape, a form of Bahamian music, and had a great time grabbing some local food for dinner and dancing until it was time for the group to pile into the taxi boat at 10 and head back across the harbor to the anchorage.  We’re hoping to be able to find the Rake and Scrape when we’re at Cat Island, as we think it would be great fun for us to incorporate that into our week of wedding festivities!
On Thursday we had a little calmer weather, and although we were unable to set up a taxishare or arrange for our packages to be picked up from Reggie Express that day, we made great use of the day.  A couple of days previously we’d finally fixed an ongoing problem with our starboard water tank, which had refused to give us any water pressure.  In a conversation with Ken and Leigh (the Parrots) they suggested that we might blow air into the tank through one of the hoses to see if we could clear whatever the blockage was and lent us their motorized dinghy pump to do so.  We had great success with their suggestion and now have a fully working starboard tank (we had some calcium build up that was blocking the hose).  In return, I volunteered to go up their mast to put their radar reflector back up so that they would have it on their return trip to the States.  When we went over to return their pump Brian and Ken worked on some computer issues that Ken was having, while Leigh and I had some lemonade and chatted in the cockpit, and once the guys were set, we set up the mast climber and up I went, getting the radar line restrung and then climbed back down.  FUN! and as always it was really great to visit with them!
The following day when I was lucky enough to be able to coordinate with Toby from Dutchess, who also had packages arriving, as did Jamie on WindWhisperer… and a 14′ tender to zip across the harbor to the town docks.  On our first ride across, we met up with Clifford, a taxi driver in town, who was able to arrange to pick up our packages from the airport for us in conjunction with another trip he was making out there. Both Toby and I did a quick run to the market, and then returned to our boats to await word from Clifford once he’d collected our packages.  Fortunately for us, our package had arrived, and Toby swung by and picked me up (Brian was at a fishing seminar at the beach) and we headed in to collect our packages.  Unfortunately, Jamie’s package hadn’t arrived, but he met us at the dock with our packages in hand.  We quickly filled up with water, disposed of our garbage, and zipped back to our boats.  I’d just arrived back by about 10 minutes when Brian came back, and the forestay process began…
We contacted the folks at St. Francis, the marina around the corner, who have a long dock, which would make cutting and assembling the new forestay much easier than attempting to do it while at anchor and they were kind enough to say that it would be OK for us to tie up to do the work provided that we were out by their lunch rush.
Brian was able to assemble the first of the Norseman fittings yesterday afternoon (Friday) and we borrowed a cutting tool from Krasna, one of our neighbor boats. We got so many offers of help and some great advice from other folks in the anchorage who have done this kind of project themselves - one of the most amazing things about the boating community is how ready and willing people are to lend a hand and help one another.  It truly is an amazing community!  We went ashore last evening to Rockin’ Ron’s dance party at Chat N’ Chill, had some terrific ribs and a great time socializing and dancing with our fellow boaters.  Knowing that we needed to tackle the forestay project today, we turned in early last night, hitting the hay at 10PM so that we could get up at 7 to pick up the cutting tool from Krasna and then head over to St. Francis.  At this point, we hit a few snags….  I’d hauled up the anchor and secured it when Brian called up to me that he needed me to come up and drive since he needed to figure out what was going on with the Garmin depth sounder unit… it wouldn’t turn on!  I hustled back to the wheel, and I piloted us along the channel back towards Monument Beach while Brian tried to sort out what was going on with the Garmin.  He replaced the fuse, only to have it still not work, and an ominous smell emit from the connector cable.  At this point, we decided best to turn back around and anchor while we tried to sort this out.  We’d no sooner re-anchored when Martijn kayaked over… and after a few minutes of the guys examining the Garmin, and the installation of yet another fuse which also tripped, the determination was made that we would have to just carefully sound our way into St. Francis’ dock cutting through the anchorage to ensure we were in deep enough water.  We were anxious to get the forestay fixed, especially given that the weather and wind prediction for tommorrow is for strong gusts, meaning for another day’s delay in installing the stay and roller furler track, and also another day where we would be relying on halyards instead of a proper stay.  By this time we’d well missed our target time of getting to the St Francis dock at 8:45 as it was almost 10:30!  I hauled the anchor up again, and we sounded our way in, and were fortunate to be able to make it all the way to the dock.  While the guys set about measuring out the stay, I set up the Topclimber and began gathering up the various parts to install the furler track back onto the mast.  Unfortunately, we discovered - after putting both Norseman fittings on, that the track wouldn’t slide over.  OOF.  So the guys took one end back off, and went through the tedious process of re-assembling the track.  All of this took longer than we’d hoped or expected, and next thing that we knew, we were sitting alongside the dock… on the bottom.  Crumb!!  Well, nothing to be done for it.  Brian, Martijn and I carefully hoisted the assembled forestay up the mast, and then Brian went up the mast to put in the cotter pin.  Success!!  He climbed back down, with me spotting him on one of the spare halyards.  Now for assembling the bottom pin, which the guys accomplished lickety split.  Of course this left us still with one small problem… we were hard on the bottom and not going anywhere.  We offered to take Martijn up to St. Francis’ restaurant to get some lunch, which he declined saying that he needed to get some stuff done on his boat, but agreed to meet up with us later for some dinner and perhaps a movie on our boat as a thanks. 
We decided to go up to the restaurant (not before we’d cleaned up a little bit) both to thank the owners of St. Francis, but also to give them some business and get a delicious lunch.  I had THE best Philly Cheesesteak that I have had outside of Philadephia, and Brian had a terrific pizza and a blender drink each to wash it down.  We are so grateful to the owners of St. Francis, who made what could have been a disasterously challenging job had we had to do it on the boat or on the beach into something much more managable.
Now we have to try to sort out the depth sounder/Garmin issue, which thankfully Skip may be able to help us at least test if it’s the unit itself or something in the wiring.  That said, we’re so happy to finally have the forestay issue resolved, and relieved (at least on my part).  Hopefully tomorrow will be a decent enough day weather wise (it’s been SO windy here and really rolly in the anchorage) and we’ll be able to go across to Kidd Cove where we can do the last of our provisioning and some laundry and then we’re hoping we’ll be heading out of here to Long Island on Monday. Wind and weather permitting.
Sunday was almost a total waste of a day. We pulled anchor and moved over to Kidd Cove so that we could take care of some last minute provisioning and the like, only to get into town to find that we had no Wi-Fi access (with the laptop) the laundry wasn’t open and the grocery store, which we did manage to get to, closed at 11 for the day.  We did what we could as far as getting some last grocery provisions and headed back to the boat where we waited for the wind to die down so that we could put the genoa back up and roll it up on the furler.  That achieved, we settled in to do some cleaning up around the boat in hopes that we’d be able to head off in the next day or so, weather and wind permitting.