Howling at the moon - Warderick Wells, Exuma Park

We had a nice evening on Aurora. It was eye opening to see how much quieter their wind generator is than ours. It looks like they have some kind of padded coupler around the neck of their generator at the top that we don’t have. I’ve also noticed that ours does not turn easily into the wind. Wayne is wondering if we’d picked up mud daubers over the summer. That’s a definite possibility.

I was able to finally access email and update my blog this morning, but not to the point of posting pictures. The bandwidth just isn’t good enough and when you’re accessing sites with pictures that also eats up available bandwidth.

Wayne tried to get the generator started, to no avail, and worked on the battery monitor as well as the generator most of the afternoon. I tried organizing my warm and cold weather clothing – putting away the sweaters, blankets, etc… It’s been in the mid to upper eighties with lows in the 70s so I think we may finally be done with the woolens! While I was sorting and packing, Wayne thought today might be a good day for me to practice with the dingy.

It’s very calm and it happened to be slack tide when he suggested my use of the dink. My big thing with it is it doesn’t always work. I can’t see myself rowing against some of the stronger tidal currents that come through here, but decided that now was a good time to get off the boat. I loaded up the looky-bucket, my mask & fins and grabbed the hand radio in case there were any problems and managed to get the engine turned over after 4-5 cranks, then headed around the basin, past the park office and over to Azaya’s for a visit. Weeeee - what fun!

Leaving Azaya, I couldn’t get the dinghy started for anything. After 5 minutes of pulling, and a huge blister on my finger, it finally turned over. What fun - not!  I noticed that the motor setting would periodically pop back into forward while pulling the cord. When it did, the whole motor lifted up. Wow. Anyhow, I did get it started then headed over to the park headquarters to let Darcy know that we’d probably be leaving in the morning and got the breakdown for our bill. It’s $15/night on the mooring, $10/day or 100 MB (whichever comes first) for Internet service and the Bahamas Fleet renewal is $50/year with 2 free nights on the mooring. After a quick dip in the water, I got the dingy started again (this time no problem) and headed back to the boat.

Wayne still didn’t have a very successful time with the generator etc. while I’d been gone. But said he’d forgotten to tell me that when the engine on the dink was warmed up, that I didn’t need the choke on. He’d noticed that I had problems getting it started over at Azaya. Binoculars are a wonderful thing – now all we need is a megaphone, or, for me to have turned on the handheld radio…

Mary Clare and Axel stopped by after their walk to Booboo Hill so we had a beer and watched a beautiful golden orange full moon rise on the horizon. It was stunning in color and size. Someone howled on the radio, which set of a round of howling on our boat. We must have sounded like a bunch of Alaskan wolves baying at the moon in harmony. The boats around us were probably wondering, “What’s up with those crazy people – howling at the moon”… Laughing… It’s those crazy Michiganders and Alaskans – howling at the moon! It truly was a breath taking sight though.

I made a nice salad and we grilled up a steak for dinner with our lovely boat bread. It’s an incredibly warm evening and my skin is tingling from the saltwater residue.