Adventures of Luck of a Fool: April 2, 2015 play day on Elbow Cay, Bahamas

This morning we listened to the cruiser’s net on the VHF radio. They announced the results of yesterday’s sailboat race starting with last place-Luck of a Fool. Now we’re famous!

We spent the morning with the generator running making water. The 90 gallon tank was empty and is connected to the water maker. We had been using the 50 gallon tank for about a day. So after making water for awhile, we were able to take a hose from our stern and use it to fill the 50 gallon tank. Well after about 20 minutes of filling the 50 gallon tank, we realized that the hose water was coming out of the 50 gallon tank and going right back into the 50 gallon tank. We had to chuckle over that before switching the controls to use the water out of the 90 gallon tank to fill the 50 gallon tank.

While we had the generator running, we charged the computers, but it is also a good time to be using them. I was given a memory stick of the photos from yesterday’s race that I needed to download and return. Plus I was able to post a couple days of this blog. I have a chart that shows the number of viewers. It averages around 50. But today it showed 2,632 viewers. Now that is bizarre. It must be people wanting to know about the Bahamas.

We wanted to go into Hopetown to the telephone company to see how to add data on to our plan. We walked quite a ways down the road that we thought the telephone company was on without finding it. We finally stopped someone and asked them where it was. We were one road over too far and past it, but it’s only open on Tuesdays in Hopetown. So we enjoyed our walk. When back in town, we saw an ice cream shop with the sign to “top up” your phone. We have seen these signs, but didn’t understand how that worked. So to be polite, we ordered ice cream :) Then we asked how that worked with our plan. We had to give them money, then they applied it to our account according to the phone number they gave us. Then there were a series of steps to go though by following the commands on the phone, to add data to our plan. Strange, but it works. And the connections have been great, even off shore where we are anchored. $33 for 2 g.

We headed back to the boat to do a little snorkeling. Since it was already 3:00, we changed into our suits, grabbed our snorkel gear and took off in our dinghy. There is a little island just north of us that was supposed to have good snorkeling. We circled it and didn’t see much from our dinghy. We should have checked the guide books one more time before we took off. So we ended up going to a beach on the NE tip of the island and snorkeled from the shore, but didn't see much besides the largest parrot fish I have seen in the Bahamas, maybe 2 feet long and it was orange. We hopped back in the dinghy and went exploring some more. We went over some grassy areas looking for conch. The only one I saw was already dead. Looking though the glass bottom bucket was pretty cool.

Then we explored the rest of the west side of Elbow Cay. We went into White Sound. There were homes, resorts and one marina. More power boats than sailboats. But there were several boats anchored outside of the sound towards the south end of the island. I had heard about Tahiti beach and we found it. It was a beautiful spot that had a long finger of a sand bar forming a half circle of beach area. The water was beautiful and shallow. We definitely want to come back and just hang out here.

Back to the boat for dinner and showers and calling it a night.