Another day, another cold front here in the Bahamas

Well, it’s Tuesday morning and the winds are strong from the west, again.  That’s not a normal direction for this area of the Bahamas and certainly not this late in the season.  However the pattern of cold fronts penetrating into the area about every six days continues, unabated.  Fortunately, we are tucked into one of the few harbors in the Exumas that offers protection from the west so it’s very calm, even if it’s windy. However, there is hope that things are improving as this front isn’t as strong as the last few have been.

The unrelenting fronts have been the topic of discussion among cruisers here who say that they have not experienced adverse winds and fronts like this in the Bahamas in many years, with the exception of this year and last.  Of course, the last two years have been out total experience, so to us, the weather is always “like this”.

Don’t get me wrong as the “like this” weather is pretty good compared to good old New England.  While our friends are experiencing relentless snowfall, we see views of clear blue water and powder fine white sandy beaches.  Yes, there’s white here too but it’s not quite the same, somehow.   That’s good, very good.

Yes, there’s even a bit of white in this photo from yesterday when Brenda and I went for a walk on the beach with some friends.  Love the gentle lapping of wavelets on the beach.  I’ll take white puffy clouds and sand over drifts any day.  See the two dinks anchored in the shallows in the distance?  One’s ours. Pretty bucolic.


As I have mentioned, no actually whined about incessantly in past posts, we have been “e-challenged” with the demise of our iPad a few weeks ago.  We are hopeful that this will be resolved soon, perhaps in just a few days.  It’s expected to arrive in Staniel Cay  very soon.  Yahoo!!  Thanks to our son Rob for handling the logistics from “State Side”.

For the last few weeks Brenda and I have been “buddyboating” with our friends Loreen and Miles who live aboard Ariel, a wonderful boat.  They have been living aboard full time for about the last six years and spend their time running from the Bahamas to Maine and back each year with an occasional run back to Wisconsin, where they keep a “land home”.

We have been swapping off on dinner prep most nights.  It’s fun, sometimes too much fun actually, to spend evenings with them.  We hope to see them again in Essex in June.

After we pick up our iPad in Staniel in a few days, we hope to make a run down to Georgetown, a very popular cruisers hangout in the southern Bahamas.  We’ll be able to visit a “sort of real” market there to re-provision.  We haven’t been to a market that has any real choice since leaving Nassau a month ago. The lardor is pretty sparse, as you can imagine.

In April we are hoping to connect with our friends Maureen and Bill aboard Kaloona Moo.  They have been in the Caribbean since November and are currently in Puerto Rico.  They will be heading north towards the Bahamas on their way back to New York, where they spend summers.  We’ll likely hook up with them south of Georgetown.

We are very interested in hearing about their time in the Caribbean and what it’s been like.  As Brenda’s “guardian angel”, no make that “guard dog”, Maureen won’t let me take Brenda somewhere where she will be unhappy, so we should get a pretty good feel for what it is like down there for girls like Brenda, self-described “cream puffs”.

I did get a note from them a few days ago and have spoken to them on the SSB radio as well.  One thing that they did mention is that the weather is a lot more settled down south as the fronts that have been vexing us here just don’t come down that far.  Yes, the trade winds are quite strong with winds blowing in the 20s each day.  However, when you anchor you are sheltered behind volcanic islands that soar thousands of feet into the air.  As a result, the winds are blocked and anchorages are calm and settled.
After months in the Bahamas with unrelenting winds we are probably ready for “settled”.  Perhaps that should be our destination next year.   I guess we will soon learn more when we hook up with Bill and Maureen to get the “download”.

Don’t get me wrong, the Bahamas are beautiful and WARM and it’s certainly better than being in the grips of a sub-zero winter.
Am I sounding a bit whiny?  Perhaps, but I am told that writers with angst are more interesting.  I guess  you’ll have to be the judge.

Oh yeah, I should mention that this post was set to our son Chris, who is now in San Francisco making some contacts in the tech area.  The routine, given our “e-challenges”, is for me to send the text and a single picture to him via our long range radio, the SSB.  Chris then takes the text and photo and posts them on my blog.  Interestingly, the “node” that I am using to connect to send this to Chris is located in Panama as that location has the best “propagation”, or signal, this time of the day.  The way it works is for my radio to send out a signal that “bounces” off of the upper atmosphere and then back down to the receiver in Panama. Pretty amazing, actually.  Thanks Chris.

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