January 06-08, 2000 -- West End

Today was a pretty light day. We started out in the morning by meeting Paul from S/V Kiana. He came over because he noticed that we had an SSB antenna and wanted to know if we could help him figure his radio out. Since we were planning to do a few things around the boat we suggested that we come over after lunch. We had a relatively simple plan, we wanted to get another coat of Armada on our rails. We pulled out the necessary stuff, and proceeded to prep the boat. Mike scuffed the teak while I started taping. Mike completed his work before I was done, so he started putting armada on areas that did not require tape. After I was done, I started helping and we completed the new coat in relatively short order. After a quick shower, we headed over to Kiana where we met Lynn. I worked with Paul on how to program frequencies on his SSB, then we went over weather faxes. Everything seemed to go pretty well, and in pretty short order, Paul was pulling weather faxes. We spent some time chatting with them about their boat and then invited them over for cocktails. We headed back to the boat and sprawled for the afternoon. Paul and Lynn came over around 6:30 PM and we spent the evening talking about our experiences cruising and comparing notes on our opinion of the Bahamas. On January 7, we decided to borrow the marina bikes and ride into town. I was amazed at the number of conch shells lying on the side of the road at various places. The water was crystal blue and beautiful. The buildings, on the other hand, were not quite as nice. Some looked like they had been there for eons, with no upkeep performed on them. We saw a number of cement docks that had fallen into disrepair, as well as a couple of fuel docks that didn't look sound at all. When we arrived back at the boat, we settled down for a little rest. Well, we actually completely sacked out for a number of hours! I woke up and wandered over to Kiana to say hey and find out how things were going. Paul and Lynn had also gone into town, only they met a couple there and invited them back to the boat. Lynn invited me aboard and we spent the rest of the afternoon getting to know a dentist and his wife from Colorado. They were intrigued with the cruising lifestyle. In fact, it was almost as if their eyes were opened! They said that when they went back home, they now had a new goal to work towards, they knew where they wanted to go! It was a great afternoon. On January 8, we considered heading back to the US However, there was a bit of north in the wind, so we decided to hold off for one more day. Since a wind blowing from the North with the Gulf Stream coming from the South can make for a unpleasent ride. We watched a couple of power boats pull in to the marina to check in so we wandered over to meet them. I ran into Lynn who asked if I could stop by later because Paul was still having problems getting weather faxes, and he was also having problems tuning the radio. I told her that I would come over right before the next set of faxes was due. On one of the boats was a family of 5, parents and 3 older kids. They were planning to cruise the Abacos for several months. When the father went to check the family in, we bid them good bye and returned to the boat. Later, I headed over to Paul and Lynn's. We went over the procedures on how to tune the radio, then discovered that Paul's small inverter was putting out to much RF noise in its current location, right above the radio. Once we powered the small inverter down, we found that the signal cleared up immediately! Faxes started rolling in and looked almost printer quality. I came back to the boat and spent the rest of the afternoon puttering around, and reviewing weather faxes as they came in. We cleaned up the boat and made sure that it was ocean ready then spent a quiet afternoon reading books