Stone Soup engines

We have been having fun hanging out with Shambala.

The other day, we were telling Mark and Conrad the story of Stone Soup. Basically, a stranger wrangles food out of recalcitrant townspeople on the premise that a boiled stone is good, but if you just add a few things it's even better (I guess it's really about working t ogether for the good of everyone). Matt has decided that the diesel engines on Perry are our Stone Soup.

Waste management for crazy people

Matt makes fun of me for being a big obsessed with garbage. Don't get me wrong, he's all for recycling and composting (in Chicago, he once yelled at a gangbanger-looking young adult that dropped a plastic bottle on the ground) but I have a tendency to take things to another level (you might say another planet).

My, what a lovely bunch of coconuts

Coconuts are abundant in most places in the Bahamas. Matt has reduced opening the stubborn buggers down to a near science, although we have broken a couple knives because it's sort of like opening soft rocks. We like eating it raw, toasted, and in granola. Matt makes an amazing coconut cream pie and it's fruit so it's good for you, I'm pretty sure. Recently, I got the bug to make our own coconut milk. It's easy enough to do with a blender but we didn't want to use that much power so I found a no blend method online.

Pipe Cay

Ooooozy, oooozy mud.

We had a fast sail from the anchorage outside Warderick Wells down to Pipe Cay. The anchorage is next to a private island. We thought that the area might have good fishing and conching because it is just south of the Exuma Land and Sea Park. The fishing didn't pan out, but we found a Cay with some trails that led to the Atlantic side where we found lots of periwinkles. These snails come jumbo-sized here.

Norman's Cay and Warderick Wells

After leaving Allen's we headed down to Norman's Cay on the Exuma sound side.  We were hoping to troll through the deep waters and catch something tasty, but we only caught tangled fishing lines of epic proportions when we changed direction a bit too rapidly. 

Nightmare Anchorage in Lizard Town

People that live on land (in other words, almost everybody in the world) usually don't worry about their houses moving in the middle of the night. When you're sleeping on an anchored boat, there is no such luxury. We met one couple in the boatyard in Beaufort, North Carolina that had sold everything to move aboard their boat and then less than a year later decided it wasn't for them and threw in the towel. The main reason they gave was that they were never able to sleep well while at anchor due to worry. Of course, you can try and reduce the stress with good equipment and good planning,  But don't think that just because you buy the best anchor setup that your problems are solved. The rub is that even if you do everything right, other boats can drag into you.

[Complains, whines, takes a brief break from complaining...]

When Mark and Conrad play stuffed animals, they verbally script out dialog for each other, including stage direction for the appropriate emotional response ("gets angry", "makes frowny face", "stomps off"). Hence the title of this blog post.

We finally got our raw water pump the day after it was supposed to arrive, for which we were relatively happy. It was $115 to get it from Florida to Spanish Wells and clear it through Bahamian customs (the cost to ship it overnight within the States was only $20). And we managed to avoid the steep 40% import duty which would have added a couple hundred more dollars because we were a "vessel in transit" with a cruising permit and the pump was "critical" to the ship's propulsion.  So there's a big reason to keep as many spares as you can on board. Matt put in the pump and tested it--no leaks, yea! We fired up the engines and everything seemed to be working as expected. Even though there was lots of fixing and reworking, it seemed like it was all under control. Now when things break, it seems that Matt has a pretty good handle on what to do. Some expertise even. Swoosh, nothing but net.