May 28-31, 2022 Prepping for storm and passage back to US, in Eleuthera

 5-28. We had been watching the weather closely to determine where and when we would go anywhere in the next week.  We originally thought we would go through Bimini on our way back to the US.  But we haven’t been there and don’t think we want to wait out rough weather in an unknown area.  We decided to stay here longer, but moved our boat deeper into the anchorage for better protection from the wind.  We set the anchor 4 times before we were satisfied.
Dave made focaccia bread today.  He made enough dough for 2 pizzas, 1 focaccia bread with olive tapenade and one loaf of bread.  That made for a hot day on the boat.  He also started dough to make buns that he will bake tomorrow.  This dough had to “ferment” overnight.
Memphis loved the mermaid video, even though she knew it wasn’t a lady mermaid and it wasn’t real.  Still got a lot of giggles out of her.  

 

 

5-29  I spent the afternoon cleaning the conch shells we have collected.  We need to store them for the trip home.  3 had live conch in them, but the others did not.  The ones with live conch had a horrible smell and attracted lots of flies.  After cleaning the outside of the shells, I used baby oil on them to preserve the nice colors, not dry out.

before

after

and flipped

before

after

flipped

we found 3 of these live and 4 in a pile after having the conch removed

I have totally given up on my low carb diet.  With Dave’s homemade breads, I had French toast for breakfast, hamburgers on homemade buns for lunch, and pizza for dinner.  
5-30 Since we will be traveling several days to return to the states, Dave decided to mix the dough for 4 loaves of bread and freeze it.  Then while we are moving the boat, we can just bake a loaf with out all the prep.
The flies were still crazy around the conch shells that had conch remains in them.  We researched what to do to fix that.  We ended up soaking those 3 shells in diluted bleach water.  We changed the water for a second bleach soak.  
5-31 We discovered that our freezer doesn’t deep freeze the bread dough fast enough.  They continued to rise inside the freezer.  We decided we had better bake them and then freeze them.  Of course it had to be a rainy day with our windows closed.  The original 4 loaves had expanded into enough dough for 8 loaves of bread by now.  

 

Life on a boat-Dave waited until the rain stopped about 5:00 before he went out on the deck to get a jerry can of gasoline.  He refilled the Honda generator so he could run the water maker for 2-3 hours to refill our water tanks.  You always have to keep a mental idea of how much water we are using and how often to run the water maker.