Leaving Georgetown en route to Long Island, 2-17-22

Every city has a party boat if it’s located on the water.  St Augustine has one.  It looks like a little tiki hut & just drives around as a booze cruise. 

One good flair gun shot and up in flames.

So, after sailing hubby being awake for majority of the last 4 nights – we discovered why no one was anchored on this end of the bay.  You guessed it.  In front of starfish beach, where we had a nice firm anchored set…in comes the Georgetown party boat. 

Imagine 30 screaming drunks 50 foot from your anchored boat.  

The bad news, this one actually just beached itself about 100 yards from us.  Music blaring, drunkards whooping it up and the full treatment.  So…there went our nice restful night at our last available anchor spot.  Seeing as it was after dark it isn’t the preferred time to re-anchor anyway.  So, lots of techno & strangely- country!?!  Who knew?  

The crazy thing was he had the gall to bring a skiff over the next day to scold us on the fact we were parked too close to the only part of the beach he is allowed to go into.  It was the most un-Bahamian thing we have experienced to date.  It wasn’t like there was a sign or anything!  Most Bahamians are awesome and very helpful as they rely on tourism for their income.  He wasn’t scheduled to come back until Sunday evening, and we would be long gone by then!  So glad to be getting the heck out of Georgetown and this was the cherry on top.

However, a few days of relaxing on the beach, reprovisioning, and we were ready to go.

Saturday morning, we headed out, limping.  Sailing Hubby had identified a leak last night in one of the bilges.  Sadly, our other freshwater pump on the other side is now leaking quite badly.  Ugh.  Good news is when he ordered the part to fix the issue on the other side and imported the parts, while we were in Hopetown, he ordered two!  Both engines have nearly 3,000 hours on them, and they have not ever been replaced.  It will be good to have both done but we didn’t think we would end up doing both on this trip and had hoped we could do it in the off season.  Oh well.  With the parts, he can at least make it all better in Long Island.  He made the command decision to leave this morning anyway as it was a short 6-hour sail to Thompson Bay, and we were buddy boating if anything went wrong.  We can run on one engine and only use the leaking one if any other issues come up.  We will run about 5 to 5.5 knots which is slower than we want but we will still get there by 3:00 this afternoon.  After we dropped anchor, Ron spent the next hour fixing the pump so he could sleep! 

Boat yoga!

Ron has his fishing pole, gaffe hook and all the gear in hopes of catching some fish for dinner tonight.  He hopes to keep whatever he catches this time as the fish he got last time was shark eaten by the time he reeled it in.  He was very sad.  

Fish head soup anyone?

Lastly, Ron submitted the renewal for our immigration papers.  For some odd reason, they will grant you a 1-year cruising permit and fishing license but make you renew your visa after 90 days.  Now we await the extension as we don’t yet have a plan to return home and now that we are near an immigration office in Georgetown, we know we could come back if we need something more to get renewed.  I guess bureaucracy is just part of the fun of international travel.