Marsh Habour anchorage ...

Penelope arrived right on time on Sunday morning, and after getting her stuff aboard Alizee, she decompressed a bit from the trip. I took her down to the William H. Albury to meet Brian and Sheree, the young captain and mate aboard the 70 foot, 14 foot beam schooner. They showed us around the boat and then they had to prepare for the boy scouts who were arriving for a week’s charter in a couple of hours.

After sharing some calamari at Curly Tails and checking out of the marina, P. and I took Alizee out into the harbor and anchor easily in the Marsh Harbor anchorage. So, from the afternoon of the 15th through this afternoon, we’ve been getting used to living aboard, cooking meals, and doing some boat chores, such as doing a second polishing of the hull with Teflon polish … she sparkles!

A big highlight of Penelope's first night here was that she flew over the Cape when the space shuttle was poised and ready for launch, and this evening after she arrived and we were on the boat at anchorage, we saw the launch from hundreds of miles away.  I managed a pretty poor photo, but it gives a sense of it.  It was truly quite something.

The dinghy runs well, even better after I adjusted the idle, and we’ve had a couple of excursions into shore, one to go to Price Right, the local supermarket, where we picked up primarily vegetables plus a really nice rib-eye for which I got out the barbecue for the first time. That went well, too, which was a nice thing.

I’ve had one boat problem, which is the Raymarine C-80 unit. Just before P. arrived, I discovered that the CF card containing all the charts was not being read by the C-80 plotter. After checking to see the card was reading by loading it into the multi-card digital reader that hooks into my laptop and seeing the chart there, I determined that one of the little prongs inside the C-80 had been pushed in somehow and wasn’t connecting with the CF card. I managed to get on line and discover that there is a Raymarine authorized service agent here in Marsh Harbor, Pat McFaden of Merlin’s Marine Electronics, located just upstairs above the Jib Room restaurant and the Marsh Harbour Marina. On Monday I took the unit into him (after borrowing the proper tool to disassemble it), and he tried his best to repair it. Unfortunately, the prongs are really sensitive and it just kept pushing back through, so we shipped the unit off to Raymarine for warranty repair. Pat figures I’ll have it back within three weeks. I hope so, because although I have a couple of sets of paper charts and a good hand-held Garmin GPS into which I’ve entered scores of waypoints, I’d feel a lot better in these thin Sea of Abaco waters with the active chart plotter handy at the helm.

A low front came through last night and this morning, so we’re holding in Marsh Harbor for another night. I also had some mail delivered to the Jib Room, which I have to pick up this afternoon. Tomorrow is supposed to be a sunny day, and I think we’ll sail to Hope Town and spend a day or so there.