Happy Birthday, Captain Jeff

We celebrated my captain’s 71^st birthday all day yesterday. It began with a French toast breakfast, and gift and card opening.

Then we weighed anchor and spent 4 lovely hours on the ocean side of the Cays, on mirror-smooth blue water, travelling to Jeff’s favourite anchorage – Rat Cay (no rats involved!). He spliced mooring lines and I waxed the cockpit while we motored along at 6 knots – no wind at all. Very relaxing…

We arrived at about 1:00 pm, had lunch, naps and swims in the clearest turquoise water I’ve ever experienced – we could see bottom 20 feet down!

A dinner of yesterday’s freshly caught lobster, with white wine and home-made chocolate cake by candlelight, in the cockpit, with the full moon sparkling on the water, and a “Happy Birthday” call with our grandchildren ended a perfect day. Jeff said it was one of his best birthdays yet.

2^nd installment – Lost at Sea

While yesterday was for relaxing, today was all adventure! It started with a dinghy trip to the town of Barreterre, 1 mile across the water. This town is the last stop on Great Exuma –a tiny village with one convenience store, a fishing dock and a few colourful houses. We actually found a bit of food in the convenience store, and happily dinghied back to the boat – or so we thought! An hour later, we were still circling around looking for our lost boat … turns out we had gone too far South, and the shoreline all looks the same. It didn’t take long to find our way back, but did make us a little nervous for a while!

Next came lunch, and then another dinghy trip to where knew there was a good snorkeling reef, and maybe some lobster to catch. We anchored there, but the waves were huge – crashing over the rocks and tossing our little boat to and fro. Nope – that wasn’t going to work – so we hightailed it back to our safe harbor, and swam around in our snorkel gear for a while, just because we had it on.

Enough adventures for one day – back to Sea Change to watch the sun set and relax over a pasta dinner. We’ll try again in George Town – two stops away.