A Tale of Two Chemists: 100 Days of Qualifying Experience

100 Days of Qualifying Experience … Wednesday 9th January 2013

It wasn't an auspicious start to the day. I got out of bed at about 6.45am worrying about the dinghy which we had forgotten to lock up last night. Looking out of the cockpit I was relieved to see the dinghy tied up to the side of the boat, but then quickly realized that there was no outboard on the transom. In a state of despair I woke Gloria to tell her that the outboard had been stolen. This turned out be a completely wrong. After arriving last night we never took the outboard off the bracket on the rail of Cotinga. It was sitting there right in front of my eyes - but obviously not breaking through to my consciousness. As soon as Gloria got up she could see the motor, and so she knew that was still there, but assumed that I was just confused and it was the dinghy that had been stolen. Anyway after a few anxious moments we realized that I was simply having some minor delusions and the day picked up from there. After breakfast we motored in to Government dock to drop off our trash - no bins, but collection straight in to a truck at 8.30-9.30am Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Then we headed over to the Hope Town Yacht club dinghy dock and tied up. We got chatting to a guy named Doug who was a long time member of East Greenwich Yacht club, but now lives down in Hope Town. We spent the morning wandering round the town and the Island. It's really an attractive place. Colorful cottages, lots of beautiful flowering shrubs - (bougainvillea, frangipani, Datura) and quite a lot of birds. We were delighted to see several bananaquits, a bird that is endemic to the Bahamas but only rarely seen in the USA in southern Florida. In contrast to Marsh Harbour, the local community seems to be dominated by ex-pats from the USA. I have to say that the people we met were extremely friendly. We were busy looking at some birds in a garden when the owner of the house, John, invited us up onto his porch for a better look. He was a lovely elderly gentleman from Indiana who's father in law had built the house in 1956. He and his wife have been coming down for the past 50 years or more. We had lunch at the local inn on a deck overlooking the harbor - toasted ham and cheese for Gloria, Crawfish roll for me. No prizes for guessing who got the best deal there - the crawfish roll was excellent. We realized that it would be very tempting just to hang out in Hope Town for days or weeks on end, but that won't help us build the boat experience we need to get a 100 ton license. So this afternoon, in part to address this issue, we took off in the dinghy to do some fishing. We spent several hours in the bay outside of the harbour trying to catch dinner. This will appear as 4 hours in our log - the time required for a qualifying day! Consequently, today we have just completed the 100th qualifying day since launching Cotinga back in May. We have about 120 days of previous experience in other boats, which in addition to the days we have logged on Cotinga leaves us 140 days to accumulate over the next 9 months. This will not be a trivial task. I should add that whilst our sailing expetise may be limited it clearly far surpasses our fishing ability. We must be the worlds lousiest fishermen. For all the time we put in this afternoon we only hooked one small fish - but it got off the hook just as we were bringing it in to the boat.

Mike

The boat on the left was trying to leave HopeTown at low tide - at the time this picture was taken she was hard aground and only came off when the tide came in later