Valentine's Day in paradise (2014-02-14)

Hope everyone had a nice Valentine's Day.  We had ours in the Bahamas.  Man, it's going to be tough to top that next year... :-)



We've had a nice week here at Leeward.  We generally took it easy, did some walking and a bit of shopping.  Dar managed to get out a few times in her kayak as well.

A nice paddle around the harbour

I also managed to sort out a couple small jobs while here as well.  The first is a problem with our windlass that has been plaguing us for the last couple months.  The spring that tensions the gypsy pressure finger had popped out of its holder, causing it to not apply sufficient pressure to the rope rode when weighing anchor.  We had to manually press on the pressure finger with a boat pole to get it to retrieve the rope rode properly.  Luckily this wasn't an issue once we got to the chain, but it was still a pain in the butt.  I managed to get the spring to seat properly again, and the gypsy pressure finger once again seems to be working as required.  Unfortunately it was probably wear that allowed the spring to pop out of the holder in the first place, so only time will tell how effective my repair was over the long term.

We had also developed a leak in the forward tube of our dinghy while we were at Great Guana Cay.  I managed to find the leak and get a patch applied, and so far it seems to be holding well.  The dinghy is 15 years old, so we're pretty lucky this is the first problem we've had with it.  Hopefully the patch will hold.

We had a front roll through here on Wednesday night, with very strong winds and thunderstorms.  The winds started picking up here on Wednesday evening, and blew strong all day on Thursday.  They finally eased overnight, and by this morning the winds were calm once again.

Strong winds and whitecaps in Black Sound

Our week was up today, and we had planned on leaving Leeward today.  As usual, plans written in the sand rarely survive high tide. :-)  Tomorrow the winds are due to pick up for the day as another front will be rolling through.  Sunday is supposed to be pretty nice, so we'll stay here until then.

That brings us to our next bit of news, the beginning  of our return trip.  When we first planned this trip we had initially looked at staying in the Bahamas until the end of March.  Later when we started looking at our timings, having to be back in Canada by the middle of May (end of May at the latest; OHIP and travel health insurance being the reasons) we realized that this wouldn't give us a lot of time to do the return trip at any kind of a leisurely pace.  We decided then that we'd start working our way back through the Abacos by the middle of February, with the thought of crossing back into the US sometime around the last week of February, or the first week of March.  This would give us a bit better of two and a half months to make the trip, giving us time to do more sight seeing, as well as being able to be more selective with marginal weather.
 
Well, it looks like that may even accelerate somewhat.  There's a weather window coming up next week that looks promising for a crossing of the Gulf Stream back to Florida, and another couple from here at Leeward is looking at taking it.  We had discussed buddy boating back to the US with them, so we have to decide if we want to take it as well.  While there's probably going to be more weather windows in the next couple weeks, there's no guarantees.

Now, this doesn't mean an end to our time in paradise.  We'll just be trading a Bahamian paradise for a Floridian paradise. :-)  We'll be spending
much of March in Florida, hitting a few locations that we wanted to visit but didn't have the time to on our southward journey.  While it will be sad to leave the Bahamas, it will take a very large load off of my mind to get the Gulf Stream crossing behind us, and to get back to the shelter and safety of the AICW.