Time to Move On

It's been a fun week here in Marsh Harbor. We've eaten some great food, listened to some great music, Judie's back has done some great rehabilitation and I did some great scuba diving. But now we're ready to move on. The plan is for us to cast off tomorrow (Sunday) morning. It might be a while before you hear from us again here on the blog. Or it might not... I've purchased a temporary subscription to an internet provider here who claims to have wireless service at many of the popular anchorages in the "outer islands". We'll see if their claim is good or not.

We're not going to go far. We'll probably just sail a few miles over to a cay near here called Man-O-War Cay. There's a place off the north side of that cay that's famous for underwater scenery. In fact, it's so nice that it's been declared a national preserve. So our plan is to anchor there for a while... we don't know how long. Part of the joy of the sailing lifestyle is not making firm plans. We'll just see how we feel each morning. One day we'll look at each other and say, let's go somewhere else.

Oh... regarding the concert that we attended yesterday. There were a couple of details that Judie didn't mention that I thought were worth telling you all about. The musician we listened to is an island dweller who is supposedly famous outside of the islands as well as locally. He's called "The Barefoot Man". He did some very humorous songs, one of which he wrote just in the past week. It was a song about the "Barefoot Bandit". I assume you've all heard about HIM in the news. He stole several planes in the US and crash landed the last one right here in Marsh Harbor. Then he stole a boat here and took it to another island not too far from here. That's where the Bahamian police finally caught up with him, shooting out his boat's engines and very nearly shooting him too.

Anyway... the Barefoot Man did a song about all that. Part of the lyrics went something like this...

"He stole a boat, he stole a plane, but worst of all he stole my name."

"Why can't we catch him? Well somebody might, if BEC would ever turn on the lights."

That last reference would go over the heads of anybody who's not local, but if you are from here you'll really appreciate it. BEC is the local power company and they are really really bad at their job. There is a power outage every single day... I kid you not... and some days the power goes out two or even three times. At first I thought they were just doing rolling blackouts on purpose because they didn't have enough capacity when everybody ran their air conditioners during the heat of the day. That would have been understandable. However, that theory got shot down when the power outages happened at night as well as during the day. So we'll have to just chalk it up to a crappy power company. The people who came here from other places are outraged at BEC's incompetence. The local people just shrug.

The concert was very fun. Good music. Lots of bikini-clad girls dancing. Lots of old men and old women trying to dance... not succeeding, but that was OK because nobody cared. Lots of shirtless young guys standing on the sidelines ogling the girls who were dancing. Why the young guys didn't dance was a mystery. They just stood there and watched the girls.

There were lots of people drunk out of their minds. The guy that Judie mentioned falling off the pier afterward the concert let out... The reason he fell off was because he was so drunk. His friends had left him to wait for the ferry all alone while they went shopping. Some friends. He couldn't even stand up on his own. It's no wonder that he fell off the pier. The water was very shallow where he fell. There were rocks right under the surface. He had cuts all over him, including one bad one on his head that was bleeding pretty good. Luckily for him there were some non-drunk people nearby who fished him out of the water. Otherwise he could have easily died.

And people ask me why I've never been drunk. Over the years I've seen waaaay too many drunks do things like this guy did. I could tell LOTS of stories about the drunks I dealt with while on business trips in Asia where the local sales rep and I took customers our for dinner and drinks in order to "establish relationships" with them. (Taking customers out to eat and drink is a very important part of the sales cycle over there.) Man have I ever seen a lot of drunks, and seeing what people do when they're drunk leaves me with no desire whatsoever to get drunk.

So anyway... back to our sailing plans. Tomorrow Judie and I will cast off the dock lines and leave what's been our home for the past week. It's been a nice place here, but it's time to move on.

Talk to you all later.

Doug