Georgetown and Southern Exumas

Leaving Black Point

 After spending several days at Black Point enjoying the festivities, we continued on south towards Georgetown.  The trip was not without excitement.....but perhaps not the best kind of excitement.  While sailing south to Little Farmer's Cay, we heard a message on VHF from one of our buddy boats - SV Entre Nous................"we are dealing with a fire onboard"..........oh no, that has to be one of our nightmares!  We were about a mile a head and SV Tra-Sea about 1/2 mile, so we both turned around to offer assistance.

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

The good news - they managed to get the fire out quickly, in fact it virtually self extinguished once the engine was stopped.

The bad news - upon later investigation by owner Mike, Larry, and Neil, numerous wires had burned in the vicinity of the starter motor, and the starter motor was not working.

The Ugly - it was an ugly mess of burned wires, but we managed to cut out and splice in new wire where needed.  But the starter still did not spin and appeared to be the source of the fire.

The really good news - Mike had a spare starter motor on board and wile there is still a problem with the ignition switch circuit, we managed to jerry-rig a start switch sufficient to keep Entre Nous cruising.

Well that took up most of the day, but we did make a short hop to Little Farmer's Cay where we ate with the obligatory stop to one of our favorite Exumas restaurants, "Ocean Cabin"

Moonrise at Little Farmers

As always, it was great to see our friend and owner Terry Bain and his wife Ernestine who I must say cooks the best Bahamian Lobster ever!

Georgetown

We beat our way down the Exuma Sound to Georgetown and took a dock at the Exuma Yacht Club.  Hmmm, not my best recommendation but we were picking up guests and it seemed easier than a bumpy dinghy ride.  The docks are rickety pilings not in great shape and we had to spider the boat between to avoid exposed bolts in the pilings.  It was a pretty rough stay with winds in the 20+kts.  The owner Choppy was nice, but he has a dock hand there named Ronald that should be watched.  He asked for food (which we gave him some), but we saw him getting on and off unattended boats, and had to ask him to leave ours at one point.  Now I am not saying he was doing anything wrong, but it did make us feel very uncomfortable, and we were happy to leave!  This is quite different to the anchorages at Georgetown which are very friendly, but were also very busy.

Anyway, once we had our guests on board, we ventured back north to see some of the Exuma sights.  While we had seen most before, it was fun to do it with friends and add a few new stops for us.  We went to Staniel Cay to see the pigs and Thunderball Grotto; Little Farmers Cay again; Oven Rock Cave; snorkeled on the Mermaid/piano at Musha and Rudder Cay; made a stop at Lee Stocking Island and explored he former ocean research center (now abandoned), and then dropped off our guests at Emerald Bay Marina.