It turns out, hauling the boat in clear Bahamian waters is harder than hauling her out of the muck of the Okeechobee waterway. It’s as if Chickadee was screaming ‘Wait! There’s more cruising to do here! See?? There’s a ray under my bow!’. Or possibly that was just us, standing next to the travelift, completely glum.
The upsides are plentiful, however. The yard is immaculate and the people are wonderful. After hauling and doting on us for a few minutes we met all of the crew, and all of the named pieces of machinery in the yard. My kind of place! (And, nice to meet you, Flossy the Forklift!)
We squeezed every last bit of fun out of the last few days on Green Turtle. We returned to a marina that we’d been to previously, and Andy and I got a lot of decommissioning accomplished while the girls dove into their vast catalog of imaginative games, played mostly under the docks and on the paddle board and kayaks. They jumped, they swam, they tied a million lines together in a complicated network that only made sense to the two of them, and they entertained the marina’s retirees with the sound of children laughing, a fact that was reported to us no fewer than ten times. Nice to know, since their revelry could have been absorbed in another, less-welcoming way. The marina also had a pool, and to negate the previous post’s joy of a pool switching to fresh water, Leeward Yacht Club’s pool went the other way, and is now salt, which is kind of a bummer. Lily had meticulously rinsed all of our snorkel gear for stowing, and then brought their masks and fins to play with in the pool, only to find she made more work for herself. Eh, well, can’t have it all!
Another day of putting the boat together (we’re on a serious fast track this year, and did the majority of our work in a day yesterday), and we’ll head out tomorrow. Back to the tundra of the north, which we’ve tried very hard not to visualize lest we start second-guessing major life choices about our primary geography. Let’s hope that spring starts next week!
