After a great ending to our visitors’ time here, we waved goodbye to them as their ferry steamed out of White Sound, and then we were back to our regularly scheduled schooling and work before play.
Andy went spear-fishing for lobster with a few fellow White Sound-ers while the girls and I went to the Ocean Beach and played in the waves. (We actually saw the dinghies out on the reefs, catching our dinner, which was fun.) We girls came home with plenty of sand from the beach, and he came home with five lobsters, which was a nice addition to our dinner.
And while we’re not plowing and shoveling 40+” new inches of fresh powder (hmm, shucks..), we are tucked in waiting out a stiff blow. Safely in White Sound on Green Turtle, yesterday was an amusing rodeo show watching boats dragging, rescues and the like. Even after we went to bed we were awoken to the sound of people rescuing their dinghies with kayaks, rescuing items flying off of decks with dinghies, and rescuing and righting who knows what else. This morning it was a steady stream of boats heading into the marina, no doubt to take a stress-relieving break with the relative comfort of a marina tie-up. (Dan actually told a great story of a man flopping back in his cockpit with a loud sigh of relief after tying up -no doubt after a sleepless night of dragging and the accompany stress- a well-earned marina stay!)
Today’s wind and weather kept us close to home, and after some school-time dominos, we made just the short hop ashore to the Green Turtle Club. There we did one last load of laundry (in anticipation of our departure tomorrow) and let the kids play with a gang of kids from two other cruising boats, who they have loved getting to know over the past week or so. Many superhero games were played, Lily and new friends ‘saved’ some free-ranging chicks from free-ranging neighborhood cats (we’ll see how long that lasts, predator-prey relationship being what it is), and we adults chatted and finished up our chores.
The forecasting for us this winter hasn’t been the most accurate of predictors of actual weather, so we’ll see how the seas are laying down tomorrow as the winds slowly die off, and hopefully it’ll be good enough for a decent ‘whale’ crossing and on to Guana. A friend in Maine once equated meteorologist to gypsies, which resulted in a great (and admittedly completely incorrect) image that has since stuck in my head of weathermen and women everywhere tossing a fistful of options written on pieces of paper into the air and seeing which would stick to the wall. Here it is simply wind strength, direction and patterns that we care about for the short-term, and I keep picturing some man on the ‘power’ end of these wind and weather sites using a Plinko board to come up with the next day’s data. Lordy, I hope I’m wrong.