Moving on Wednesday

Chris here.. There's another blog entry right below this one that I just wrote, and it's very important to me so I want to make sure y'all don't miss it.

Tomorrow we leave Little San Salvador.  We had a pretty cool time here.  This island is owned by a cruise line and the ship came in today.  It wasn't difficult to "blend in", and a couple bottles of rum go a long way with the "locals".  I'll leave it at that.  The only two negatives among the ton of positives are 1) There is a lot of surge in the harbor so it's pretty rolly and uncomfortable, although we've set up our anchor in a way that reduces that quite a bit, and 2) The waves roll onto the beach where we "parked" our dinghies earlier and ended up swamping all of them, filling them completely with water and getting into the gas cans.  Everyone, save one boat, was able to get their engines going after a lot of filtering of the fuel, but one boat is still having engine issues.

We'll be heading to Eleuthera tomorrow.  According to our cruising guide, Eleuthera is an "island of firsts".  It was the first republic in the New World with the first constitution and the first Parliament.  The first inhabitants were the Lucayan Indians who were enslaved by the Spaniards in the early 1500's.  The first attempt to actually colonize the island was in 1649 when the former governor of Bermuda formed a company called the "Company of Eleutherian Adventures" with the object of settling this and adjacent islands.  Each adventurer was required to pay a price to be part of the group and in return was guaranteed 300 acres to begin with and 2,000 acres of land later.  The ships carrying the Adventurers were wrecked somewhere along the coast and the survivors took shelter in a large cave.  Although they only lost one crewman, they lost all of their provisions.  They had a hard struggle to survive and ended up spreading out throughout Eleuthera.

We'll be heading to Cape Eleuthera Marina to get diesel, gas, water and do laundry - hopefully.  Our various cruising guides disagree on the state of the marina, whether it's in shambles or recently renovated, and whether it has restrooms, showers, and most importantly - a laundromat (you did see Kristen's shorts in the picture below, right???).  The rest of our kid boat group will be heading to Rock Sound, about 11-12 miles past where we'll be.  We'll meet up with them on Thursday morning.  There are supposed to be some heavier winds over the next few days and a few squalls, but not until Thursday, so hopefully everything will work out fine.

Again, if you're just joining us, follow our course, live, by clicking on the tracking link on the right side of the page.