Date                Wednesday 28 March 2012

Overnight we had a steady 20 knot wind and at last the wind generators kicked out some decent amount of power; for the first time now that we have digital meters fitted we know that under 15 knots of wind produces no useful contribution.  Anyway, that combined with good performance from the solar panels later yesterday and today meant that we woke to fully charged batteries.  No excuse but to have another go with the bread machine on the inverter.

Previous efforts have resulted in loaves similar to the bricks made out of clay and straw by the Children of Israel in captivity; funny what you remember from primary school bible story classes, not so funny however when you have an electric machine that produces them from flour, yeast and water.  This time the boat was stationary and there were no unexpected knock backs and ‘hey’ a result.

An expedition ashore was mounted post lunch with a visit to the Park Ranger and a walk.  The chatelaine of the Rangers’ office was delighted to tell us that as we did not take a mooring buoy we could not have WiFi.  Well at $30 for a buoy per day and $10 per day for WiFi she was not striking much of a bargain but such are the small delights of bureaucrats the world over.  We really won out of this one as we subsequently found that WiFi was very slow, Skype and many other things were barred and it was not working today anyway!  A quick $70 saved but email and updates to the blog will have to wait.

Notwithstanding all of this fun the Cay was very interesting and beautiful.  We took a walk to Boo Boo Hill where by tradition visiting sailors deposit driftwood carved or painted with their boat name and date on a cairn.  There are some intricate designs that must have taken an age to execute.  The hill is also, of course, haunted by the ghosts of long dead natives.  On a day where you could see for ever they were not in evidence

The view from Boo Boo Hill looking North

And west back across the Cay to the Ranger station

The north creek mooring field, the only deep water moorings are here:

And back across the anchorage to Caduceus

On our return to the boat we stopped by in the Emerald Rock mooring field at ‘Shalamar’ and called on Sebastian and Liz Watt who we had first met at Highbourne Cay.  ‘Shalamar’ is a beautiful Philip Rhodes Yawl dating from 1941.  A drink was duly offered, accepted and imbibed.  Sebastian is a native of the East Anglia and Liz is from the USA and they are heading to wards Puerto Rico in company with a French single handed sailor Luc, from La Rochelle with an Ovni, ‘Alex Marie’.

They were sailing tomorrow, Friday, for Big Majors Spot, a good anchorage for Staniel Cay and leaving at 0900.  We decided to join the other two boats and have a sail in company.