A Cuttlefish under Daruma while at Yacht Haven
A Barracuda that was on the camera from a couple years ago
January 29, 2016
A couple years since I've updated and I don't know where to begin. We've been a little stagnant in the cruising department due to a couple issues, one with USCIS while trying to get green cards and the other was a lightning strike on the shore power at our dock in Florida while we were in Canada when our grandson was born. Resolution of the first was to just kick us out of the US and the other has taken a few years and a small fortune to resolve but I'm happy to say that it all works better than ever.
I lost my phone overboard while trying to rush to an airport so many pictures I wanted to post are gone and the replacement as of yet won't let me up load from it so until I figure that out we are not in chronological order.
It has been a couple bad years in a row and I wonder it could possibly get worse and then it somehow does so surely we are near the point of nowhere to go but up.
I have 3 and half months off this year and have spent a good deal of them without Traci here as she had to fly home for a family medical emergency, part of the "yes it can get worse" and it did. She is due back Sunday evening, the 31st. :) In the meantime I tried to carry on as normal and had the Patricks down for 2 weeks.
Shawn and I both celebrated birthdays while they were here so we drank some Crown Royal that Traci had bought us for the occasion and we picked our way south towards Thunderball Grotto.
The weather this year totally sucks, front after front sweeping in from Florida. We got to fish for a few hours on one day which was limited as my new Navionics charts don't show the Exuma Park boundaries and Shawn hooked into a Barracuda but no Mahi. On the way back up it was too rough to go into the deep water so no fishing. As we approached Allens Cay on the same track that we lay on the way down I hit some coral and put a hole in the boat on the port side keel. Seems the full moon had something to do with the tide being much lower than usual and I didn't know enough to account for it. My bad. The bildge pump kept up nicely but we were still pumping out about 30 gallons an hour. On our return to Nassau the good folks on Ubuntu had some miracle epoxy that sets up under water and I applied that and slowed it down by 90% or so.
Before heading this way from Florida we had to change the sail drives as the lightning had blown the aluminum housing to bits as it seeked ground to the water. The motors had to be unbolted and moved ahead a few inches and the drives removed and replaced while the beached and the tide was low. Soon as I can get pics off the phone I'll post them.
A ray inside Thunderball
Leslee
I'd like one of these!
Damaged keel with epoxy repair
