When there is a full moon, the sun goes down on one side of the boat while the moon comes up on the other.  We like the moon.  It lets us see in the dark of night.

You may not recognize the “new” Bill.  With a scraggly beard and this horrible tropical get up, I’m trying to disassociate myself from him, but I am afraid I’ll not lose him even in a crowd.

We spent a week anchored at Normans Cay as a couple of cold fronts passed over us giving us strong winds and cool (68F) weather.  We wondered around the island both ashore and in the dinghy.  They have built a 5000 foot runway for private jet planes and are constructing a megayacht marina with planted palm gardens.  We enjoyed four $8 beers at the old but now gentrified McDuff’s restaurant where lunchtime hamburgers are now $25.

To me it seems that there is something wrong with flying in on your float plane to hop out and swim around a crashed cocaine hauling C-46 that is resting in six feet of water.  But, that was what these people did one day at Normans Cay.

We found a leak in our diesel fuel tank and had to backtrack to New Providence to buy the things we needed to repair the tank.  In the morning the sky looked like this.  You know, “Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning.”  We arrived before the weather turned bad.

This is the fuel tank coming out of the boat.  Bill has already removed the table, the floor boards, the metal rods that hold the tank down, and the wedges that hold it in place.  You can see just a little bit of the filthy bottom.

Scrubbed clean and with epoxy putty spread into the corroded spots, the tank looks much better.  The dinghy foot pump’s hose is still attached to the tank.  We had pressurized the tank with air to find the leak.

I don’t have a ‘before’ picture of the bilge, but it was really filthy.  Now clean, it is not pristine, but it is so much cleaner and better smelling.

I am not fond of marina living.  Everything is hard.  Even getting off the boat is a job for a gymnast.  My legs are so short, and the gap is so long.

With the tank repaired, we are back doing what we came to do; relaxing, taking in the view, and enjoying the beautiful weather.

Happy St. Paddy’s Day from Irish Eyes anchored at Shroud Cay.  [That is when I wrote this.  It has taken until now to upload it to the internet.  ...and you think your internet is slow...]

When I last wrote we were anchored in Miami Beach.  It took us about a week to buy our food, some missing spare parts, and the things we had forgotten to bring from New Bern.  We toured around Miami and Miami Beach, sent our winter clothes to Julia, and had a few restaurant meals.  I really enjoyed watching the crazy people in Miami Beach.  It was like watching the animals in the zoo.  But, after nine days in Miami Beach I was tired of people watching.  The boat was ready to go, and so were we.  So, we pulled up our anchor and headed just a little farther south to No Name Harbor on the southern tip of Key Biscayne.

By anchoring outside No Name Harbor for our last night in the US, we had a much shorter (and much straighter) trip in the dark to the open ocean.  To try something a little different this year, rather than going to Bimini, we planned to sail all day then all night to reach Morgan’s Bluff on the north tip of Andros Island in the mid-morning of the next day.

The anchor was up, and we were underway at about 5:30am on Monday, February 27.  The moon had set by the time we got underway, but the sun was scheduled to rise about 6:15.  In the dim light before sunrise, the navigation marks were easy to see as we motored out the Cape Florida Channel to the ocean.  I was much happier not having to find our way down the channel by searching for the red and green daymarks with a spotlight.

The crossing of the Gulf Stream was uneventful.  We passed north around Bimini in the mid-afternoon and kept on going.  In the evening the moon’s reflection on the water behind us was breathtaking and its later setting was spectacular.  The moonlight made it much easier to identify the boats going by us and to see the several other boats anchored on the shallow banks for the night.

When we got to Morgan’s Bluff the next morning, we had been underway for 28 hours.  Whew.  Bill went ashore to check us into the Bahamas.  I stayed onboard Irish Eyes because the Captain is the only one allowed on land ‘till we have been cleared into the Bahamas.  Bill got the paperwork done, and the immigrations officer gave us leave to stay until July.

Several years ago, we met a couple who raved on and on about Andros and Morgan’s Bluff.  They spent a large part of the winter there.  The woman in this couple told me how great it was to watch the Bahamian women make Androsia batik fabric.  The fabric is sort of tie dyed in bright colors with motifs of shells, fish, pineapples, and other tropical things.  I would love to see the fabric made.  Well, the Morgan’s Bluff we saw had three buildings; a bar, the harbor master’s office, and a filling station.  Google told us that the Androsia factory was an hour’s drive south in Andros Town.  It was far too far for us to walk.

Since we didn’t find much of interest in Morgan’s Bluff, and since the weather was going to change and bring rain and strong winds, we decided to move on to New Providence Island.  In light wind we motored the 30 nautical miles to New Providence’s Southwest Bay and anchored off the entrance to the Albany Marina and Resort.  Our guidebook says the marina may be the most expensive in the world at $6.00 per foot per night (with a 50 foot minimum) plus a $500 per day resort service charge plus the usual 7.5% VAT.  Tiger Woods and some “friends” own the place. It was almost dark by the time our anchor was down, and we collapsed for a full night’s sleep while our anchor held us safely in place for free.

Our destination the next day was Norman’s Cay.  To get there before dark, we put up our sails and ran the engine to keep up our speed.  The boat heeled over until the starboard rail was in the water.  It was a rollicking motorsail, but we managed to get the anchor down on the west side of Normans Cay before sunset.  While we were underway, Bill was sitting at the navigation station and discovered that his feet were resting in seawater.  Somewhere in our quarter berth (which was full of all sorts of boat things and small amounts of beer, wine, and liquor) there was a leak.

Bill spent the entire day Thursday taking the things out of the quarter berth, finding and repairing the leak, and putting all the stuff back in the quarter berth.  The leak appeared to come from two of the four screws that hold the antenna tuner for the shortwave radio to the foot of the quarter berth.  The screw ends go into our rear anchor locker which fills with seawater when the boat heels to starboard.  (Remember, we put that side of the boat underwater?)  Well, the water leaked in around the screws.  There is always something to fix on a boat.

A cold front was approaching the Bahamas from the US.  The wind would to be strong, first from the southwest, then the west, then the northwest, and finally from the north.  The Bahamas Meteorological Office forecast for Sunday hilariously said, “Boaters should remain in port.  Winds northerly at 20-25 knots in the northwest Bahamas… …seas up to 20 feet in northerly swells across all areas, across the ocean.  No significant weather expected.”  While we laughed at the “No significant weather...”, we decided to move into the Normans Cay Cut where we would have protection from the west and north winds.

Friday, the wind picked up a little, but as the weather gurus said there was more to come.  The number of boats anchored around us increased over the next two days.  Our Kingsport friends, Rob and Minta Fannon, came in their boat, Caroline, and joined the anchored fleet on Saturday.  The wind continued to clock around and blow about twenty knots.  The water in our anchorage was fairly smooth, not completely calm, but not too bad either.

On Sunday we had planned a dinghy exploration trip with the Fannons. But, with twenty knot winds, spray flying, and an air temperature of 69 degrees, we instead spent the afternoon chatting in the cabin of Irish Eyes rather than riding around in a wet dinghy.

Our bad weather came from a couple of cold fronts that had dumped snow over the eastern United States and had spawned a severe nor’easter in New York and Boston.  We stayed anchored in the Normans Cay Cut for a week.  We did move the boat around in the anchorage twice.  Once because another boat anchored too closely to us, and once again for better protection from the choppy waves.  During calmer periods we went exploring.  Bill began his hideous habit of collecting beach trash.  So far, he has brought back to our boat a small blue ball, a diver down flag on a float, a sandy baseball hat, and a medium sized cone shaped Styrofoam fishing float.  Unlike Bill and his random junk collecting, I am trying to be very discerning in my shell collecting.  I have only saved a single perfect large top snail.

One afternoon while Bill was piddling about, he opened the cover to the bilge.  The bilge is the nasty, dirty underworld of the boat where the 36 gallon fuel tank lives.  Bill saw diesel fuel floating on the bilge water.  We got out the garden hose we use to wash off the anchor when it is muddy, attached it to the wash down pump, and washed the oil out the bilge with seawater and detergent.  Twelve hours later there was oil in the bilge again.  There was a leak in the aluminum fuel tank.  The tank was as old as the boat, and for a couple of years Bill had talked about taking it out and inspecting it.  It seems he waited just a little too long.

We decided it would be best to go to a Nassau marina to work on the tank.  The boat would be safe with the engine inoperable, we could find most things we might need to repair the tank, and we could take the tank off the boat to work on it.  Palm Cay Marina on New Providence was the closest cruiser friendly marina.  To slow the leak, Bill pumped 20 gallons of fuel out of the tank and into the five gallon fuel jugs we carry on deck.  On Friday, March 9 we motorsailed from Normans Cay to Palm Cay Marina.  By supper time we were tied up in a slip at one of their docks.

Saturday morning Bill began the task of removing the fuel tank from the boat.  First, he made a couple of trips to a grocery store to buy gallon jugs of water; not for the water, but for the jugs.  The last of our fuel went into the emptied jugs and the inside of the tank was wiped out with paper towels.  Then, we unbolted our table from the floor and tied it in place on top of one of the settees.  We removed the salon floor, set it aside, and took out the tank.  The outside of the tank was a filthy, greasy, gross mess.  We put it in the cockpit on top of a sheet of plastic.  Bill scraped off most of the mess, then he wiped off the rest of the crud with a whole roll of paper towels wet with clean diesel fuel.  Next, we moved the tank to the dock where Bill scrubbed it with a wire brush and paint thinner.  He pressurized the tank with our dinghy foot pump and found the tiny leak by painting Joy detergent and water over the bottom of the tank.  The lowest part of the tank was corroded, and the leak was in one of the corroded spots.  Bill put some epoxy putty on all the corroded areas and left the putty to harden.

Early Monday morning, the remains of another cold front passed over us.  We had 4.8 inches of rain with thunder, lightning, and lots of wind.  I was glad we were safely in the marina.  Palm Cay had several courtesy cars available for marina visitors to borrow.  In the Bahamas they drive on the left-hand side of the road.  Fortunately, the courtesy cars are right hand drive (the British kind).  Bill drove while I navigated on a trip to three of the marine supply stores in downtown Nassau to buy the things to patch the tank.  With all the rain, the streets were full of standing water.  The rain continued on and off all day, so we got only a little more work done.

Tuesday, Bill painted the whole bottom of the fuel tank with epoxy resin and put fiberglass cloth and epoxy on the lowest part of the tank.  That done, Bill decided to clean the area of the bilge that was under the tank.  I did not offer to help with that nasty job!  I admit the bilge looked (and smelled) much better when he finished.  Wednesday, we put the tank back in the boat.  Bill attached all the hoses, and we filled the tank with diesel fuel.  We watched and did not see any oil in the bilge. Hooray!!  The engine started and ran just fine.  We were free to leave the marina.

While the tank was out, the cabin was in chaos.  The dining table was atop one of our settees, and the settee cushions and Bill’s tools were everywhere.  I was glad when it was all over.  If Bill had not been able to fix the fuel tank, I do not know what we would have done.  Our two daughters, their husbands, and all five grandchildren plan to meet us in Blackpoint the first week in April.  They will stay in a rented a house because all eleven of us will not fit on the little ol’ Irish Eyes.  Just the thought of our having to go back to the US to get the tank replaced was devasting to me.  I have to be in Blackpoint that week!  I can’t miss the kids and grandkids.

We left Palm Cay Marina Thursday morning sailing to Highbourne Cay for the night.  After a peaceful night anchored there, we left Highbourne and sailed the ten miles to Shroud Cay, one of our favorite places in the Exumas.  We will explore the creeks around Shroud Cay for the next couple of days.  Another cold front is to pass over us next week, so we will move then to find better protection from the expected winds.

Hope those of you with snow soon see some Spring Green.  It was an unusually cool 63 degrees this morning.  I have on a sweatshirt, but my feet are still bare.