Bedtime in our house has never been a particularly difficult, drawn-out ordeal, but Chickadee bedtime breaks records for speed. At home we read to the girls, sometimes together and sometimes individually, and then we leave them to read to themselves. Lily usually makes it about ten more minutes, and Violet has been known to stay awake in bed for an hour or more, happy as can be with books, doodling pads or stuffies for imaginary games- it just takes her brain longer to wind down. About a month before we left she started a new request at the hug-and-kiss-goodbye stage where she asked me to “Come back in 5 minutes”. Since she doesn’t have a clock or watch in her room, I’d use a bit of mom-advantage and take my time, cleaning up downstairs, coming back in ‘5 minutes’ to see her again. The goodbye was the same: “come back in 5 minutes”. When I was near their room I’d poke my head in and either choose to show myself or not, depending on how close to sleep she was. Some nights she’d be so close, yet her stubborn nature still shone through, whispering with closed eyes and one hand held up from her slumber with all fingers waggling “5 minutes”.
Fast forward to Chickadee, where Lily falls asleep at dinner most nights, and Violet has us brush her teeth half of the time since she can’t bring the brush to her mouth in her exhausted state. The “5 minute” gesture is laughable but oh-s0-sweet. She can barely get the words out before she dozes, and last night her ‘5-er’ hand up to me fell and slapped her own face as she spoke. (This all goes down most nights around 7:30, by the way, lest you think we’re torturing our children with midnight adventures… they play HARD.)
It was remarkable that they slept at all for our last Hope Town night, but sleep they did. We had set a second anchor for security in preparation for the 30-40 kt winds forecasted, but it was a sleepless night despite. The rain came in full force around 11pm, and a line squall blew through with a blast that felt like a Mack truck hitting us on the beam. It not only put us on our ear for a brief chaotic moment, but yanked our primary anchor out and left us with our secondary on the job solo. (Though we didn’t see the anemometer at the time (too busy holding on), we are guessing that it was somewhere in the 50-60kt range. It flipped Ruach’s dinghy with the engine on it, and we’re shocked that we didn’t lose any of the gear on our deck.) A bit of fiddling with rodes and another stiff gust and both anchors were reset as we could tell, but I was wired and proceeded to stay awake until about 4am when the winds died down. I stood in the companionway and watched the boat swing repeatedly back and forth between the two anchors, and the relative quiet and still of the morning was a welcomed relief.
On Thursday we steamed into Marsh Harbour, where we enjoyed a on again-off again rainy day and tried to recoup some brain cells from our mental anchor-watch flogging. We’ve found that rum helps.
Yesterday morning we walked to the ferry terminal about a mile from the harbor here and met friends coming in from Hope Town and headed for the airport. It was a lovely recon mission for the rest of our day, and an even lovelier chance to see our friends once more.
Recon to find a perfectly perfect perch for our post-schooling and work day: we raced back to the boat for a motivated session before heading to the Abaco Beach Resort, where we lounged by the pool complete with bridges, a swim up bar and comfy loungers. The entire resort was as immaculate as we’ve seen- the beach had a playground, corn toss, hammocks, kayaks for the using and a large chess board. We ate lunch on the pool deck overlooking the marina, and the kids swam for about 5 of the 6 hours that we were there. TGIF and hooray for ‘winter break’- even though we’ve had them do school all week despite their peers’ break, this was a treat to reward the effort.
Today we’ll do a quick provision and diesel run and head to Sandy Cay for hopefully another snorkeling adventure today or tomorrow. After a few days roaming south of here, we’ll need to poke our way back north for preparation to cross.
For now though, I’ll be back in 5 minutes.