Paul Heads Home

Paul Heads Home   …   Monday 7th Jan 2013

I would be remiss if I didn't start todays entry with a description of last nights dinner. We took the dinghy in the dark directly to the dock below "Curly Tails" restaurant (so called because of the curly tailed lizards that live round here). I didn't have very high expectations for dinner, but I couldn't have been more wrong. We all ate fish; Gloria - grilled grouper with roast potatoes, Paul - plantain encrusted grouper with beans and rice, Mike - Jamaican jerk red snapper, also with beans and rice and a papaya / tomato salsa. They were all fantastic - some of the best fish I have ever eaten! A wonderful meal to mark the end of Paul's visit.

This morning Gloria and I took the dinghy into town, whilst Paul stayed on the boat to pack up his things ready for the flight home later in the afternoon. Our first stop was BTC (Bahama Telephone Company) to buy a cell phone. We were very impressed with store - like walking in to an Apple shop in the USA. We picked the cheapest phone available (samsung) which cost $40 including fitting the SIM card, and then added dollars to a pre-paid account. It seems that it's really easy to top up your balance and the texts / call rates are significantly lower than using our Verizon phones over here. Next stop Ace Hardware to buy a couple of new fishing lures and some fishing line to replace the kinked line that we have on the reel at the minute. Lastly we called by the Out Island Internet company to set up roaming wifi access for the next couple of months. The service is pretty good here in Marsh Harbor and is supposed to be good in all but one of the other major harbors in the region - so we may not have connectivity in the more isolated areas we hope to visit, but we should be able to connect in whenever we come back to the more populated areas.

After lunch the three of us jumped in the dinghy along with our two folding bikes and Paul luggage and headed back to shore. We called on the VHF radio for a taxi, which appeared within a couple  of minutes and we all drove out to the airport. I'm always keen to leave plenty of time for travel to the airport, check-in etc but to today we arrived with a ridiculous amount of time to spare and having completed check-in we still had a coupe of hours to wait until Paul's flight. However, we took seats in the waiting area (outside the terminal next to the dusty approach road) and chatted and watched the people go by. Before we knew it, the plane arrived and we said our goodbyes. It was great having Paul along. Whilst the passage from Florida to the Abacos had turned out to be very straightforward, just having him there really helped our confidence, and it was just a lot of fun to do the trip together. In some ways it would have been nice to have had more wind and been able to sail more of the distance. On the other hand, the wind is now expected to pick up to 15-20 mph from the east for the next several days and that would have been a long tough beat. After saying our goodbyes Gloria and I jumped on our bikes and cycled back to town - a somewhat scary experience with all the potholes and quite a lot of traffic. Our plan for the next couple of weeks is to start to explore the region.

Mike

26 32 47.8  N, 77 03 25.0 W

Gloria and Paul in the executive lounge at Marsh Harbour Airport

United Airlines flight to Orlando

One of the friendly airport staff