The Frenzy in George Town

We had a great time walking around George Town and checking out the shops on Saturday. Everything here is within walking distance and I’m getting the idea we might not get the bikes back out for months. We are getting on-line at a restaurant and bar called Eddie’s Edgewater; there’s also a little computer store which charges $3 a day…come to think of it, that might be a better deal since we tend to buy a couple of beers every time we come to Eddie’s. We had an invitation for ‘happy hour’ from Bev and Arne aboard Scandia. The water was a little choppy, so instead of going over in the dinghy, we just pulled up our anchor and moved Maia 15 minutes away to Sand Dollar beach. It was a lovely Saturday evening with Bev & Arne and Peter & Oriana, spent catching up and talking about our future plans. Bev is such a wonderful hostess; and it really seems like they are quite the popular couple among the cruisers since everyone is always checking with them on the radio in the morning. The crowd came over on Sunday morning to check out Maia and we chatted and laughed some more. Just as everyone was thinking of leaving to go out for lunch, a parade-of-sorts started up with many boats flying flags and presenting themselves to a committee. We watched the boats come by and blew our horn and took pictures. Conrad and Sally came over on their way back from helping the committee, to see what was going on with us, and then we were 8 people on Maia. I wasn’t nearly as good of a hostess as Bev and Sally, because by the time everyone left around 3pm, I hadn’t served anything other some coffee and peanuts…way to blow my chance at magnificence. Reinhart got a little kite flying in and then the daily beach party started up where we met lots of new folks with interesting stories.

The big buzz had been about everyone’s favorite tropical ham weatherman, Chris Parker, giving a presentation here in George Town on Monday. We listen to Chris every morning at 6:30 for his Bahamas forecast and sometimes at 7:30 for his Caribbean forecasts; after each forecast his subscribers can ask about specific areas and crossings. The buzz came to its culmination on Monday and the majority of the cruisers showed up….there was standing room only for Chris’ 2 part weather seminar on weather prediction, weather tools, and interpretation. I really think we learned a lot, we’ll just have to see if we manage to remember it all for more than a week. We will be subscribing for Chris’ specific forecasts to get us across our big legs over the next several months; although, we’ll be communicating with him via email rather than over the SSB radio since we only have a receiver. We dinghied by Conrad & Sally’s to say goodbye since they were leaving on Tuesday and ended up staying over there for dinner on Tuesday night. We already owed them a dinner and now we owe two!

Today, Tuesday, we are jugging water out to the boat (moved back to Kidd’s Cove for the process) and doing laundry in town. We’ll be motoring Maia over to the “monument” anchorage and then taking the dinghy into Hamburger Beach to talk with some other southbound cruisers this evening and see if anyone wants to travel with us (buddy boat). The nice weather is going to force us to get underway tomorrow rather than enjoy the hectic pace of George Town Regatta Week which starts on Wednesday. We should be leaving bright and early on Wednesday morning to take advantage of light winds to Rum Cay; from there we will be waiting for a cold front to blow us to the Caribbean, either in one swoop or in many hops, we’ll see. Our next engagement is with Nicol on St. Thomas on March 17th, so that is our focus right now…we’ve got 2½ weeks to find the right weather to take us 600 miles.

We’ll try to update the Blog along the way, but since publication by email hasn’t worked since we left the US, we may not be able to update again until early to mid March. Please keep checking back