TUGUDTUBTRU

Part I Hopetown

We had our good friends Joanie and Dieter join us for a bit of island living and easy adventure. Our plans were to depart Boat Harbor the day they arrived and travel to Hopetown. We need a high tide to enter the Hopetown harbour which was a bit after 6pm, truthfully 30 min before or after high tide are fine too. Anything less just wont cut it. There are two channels into the entrance and we can only use the deep draft channel which cuts away from the entrance towards the south making a sharp turn to the north about fifty feet from shore giving us about an extra foot of water.
Joanie and Dieter arrived in the early afternoon with just enough time to get things stored before pulling off from the dock. It was a bit iffy because  the winds were forecasted to be 20-25kts from the NNE. If so we might need to delay until things settled down. Fortunately, the actual winds while still breezy, were in the mid teens and doable and would settle further still. With that in mind we made the decision to keep to our itinerary.  

Officially we named this cruise 
TUGUDTUBTRU.....From a sign we found in Hopetown
...meaning Too Good To Be True !!
well said!

FAWLINDC ....
was a naming option too but somehow Fall in da sea did not quite cover a subject on a boat we liked!
Folks in Hopetown definitely have a sharp sense of humor.

The only marina were we can stay is on the west side of the harbor and is Hopetown Inn and Marina which is being redone as part of a resort. To get to town we need to drop the dinghy and go to the other side through the mooring fields. So first thing the next morning we got busy and also decide to get the kayaks out.

We have two Airis kayaks which are inflatable for easy storage and quick and simple deployment.They are incredibly strong and stable in the water.

Dieter is all decked out and ready to go for a nice kayak tour of the harbor.

After a bit of early morning fun activities we "dinked" across the harbor to the Hopetown dingy dock.

The local sailing club provides a free dinghy dock open to the public and is the main place folks tie up too. You must use a stern anchor and bow in, which allows a larger number of folks to dock.

We set out for a beautiful morning of exploring this very charming Cay.

Not too strenuous but so many nice places to stop and enjoy the moment.

Such colorful scenery and beautiful plantings which kept us quite entertained.

 On the ocean side of Elbow Cay is a beautiful setting with clear waters and outer reefs, no pun intended.

If there is an image of what the Bahamas looks like this is one of the ones that come to mind.

These Cays do not have a lot of natural resources, no fresh water or indigenous food sources. Water is supplied using cisterns and more  recently water makers both large scale and small residential units like we have aboard Seabright.
This was an interesting monument recounting the history of the early English who transplanted edible plants to the Cays. Made more noteworthy by this particular Captain and crew aboard HMS Bounty and Captain Bligh and the infamous mutiny! 

When we first arrived in Hopetown we made dinner reservations at a relatively new and very good restaurant called Firefly
It is approximately 2.5 miles south of Hopetown at the bend in Elbow Cay. They would pick us up in what we assumed would be a golf cart, which is one of the main methods of getting around. We were surprised and later charmed by Donnis our wonderful driver and our method of transportation (Joanie rode shotgun)... .certainly open air for the rest of us! He avoided every bump in the road along the way.....
Our return was in the golf cart with only stars to light the way back to the Harbor.

We departed the next morning,
again at high tide and made our way out of the tranquil Hopetown Harbor on our way to Man-O-War Cay.

Lynyard Cay

We have had very nice weather for the past 5 days or so and decided enough of sitting at the dock, lets go out and anchor. We left last Wednesday and headed out to the southern end of the Sea of Abaco to Lynyard Cay. It could not have been nicer, 5-10 kts breeze and calm seas. Think of it as pay back for those anchorages with 25 kts winds. Because of the hull shape, Seabight rides the the seas at anchor very nicely. We had some rollers from the nearby North Bar Inlet but they were hardly noticeable. We traveled with Ray and Susan aboard Copeing and Bruce and Bonnie and their guests Henry and Lara aboard True Colors. The clarity and color of these waters never cease to be amazing.

We anchored in approximately 21 ft of water, a bit deep for this area where the averages tend to be under 10'. We put out 146' of chain, set the anchor  and deployed the snubbers. I like to have the snubbers down to the water line so that it keeps the angle of the chain to the shaft low in the event of strong winds. The rule, in my head, is to keep the shaft angle parallel to the bottom of the sea and do not let it exceed 9 degrees and it is less likely to drag. Anything over 9 degrees of shaft angle to sea bottom and the chances of the anchor pull increase exponentially.

You can see the new chafe guards coming out of the hauser holes, they are great. This also shows the snubbers low to the water. We swung in a tight little arch, that if you did not have the anchor watch on tracking how the boat is moving,  you would not know you were moving at all.

We always set an anchor watch,  typically I use the Furuno chart plotter for this.  We can set an alarm on a radius based on the center of where the anchor is. The distance can be changed depending on the circumstances of how much chain we deploy, how crowded it is, the local topography and how tight the space is.

We dropped the dinghies and went to Little Harbor (way too shallow for us in Seabright) and had a nice lunch at petes pub and gallery.com/

Jeannie and Susan decided to go exploring the coves and beaches in the kayaks.

Bruce and Bonnie aboard True Colors had rented a 23 foot Albury runabout and we all jumped aboard for a short ride to Snake Cay to see if we could find Eagle Manta Rays.

Pictured are form the left Jeannie, Bonnie and Susan sitting on the bow of the boat.

Here's a crowd looking overboard for the rays. We saw about a dozen or so rays as they glided around the the mouth of the creek.

A typical view of the waters and the land mass of limestone.

We headed back after a few nights on the hook and saw this rainbow off in the distance.

We went back to attend the RHMYC annual Commodore's Ball whose theme was the roaring 20's.

The girls got gussied up for the big event and had a blast in the process. It was loads of fun and good food.

Making our own chafe guards

Last year we rigged up a new set of snubbers for when we anchor out. I did a prior post on snubbing and how it works. What I did not do at the time, much to my shame,  was to add chafe guards to the line to help prevent the constant rubbing these lines get especially during a good blow.
We use a Seadog chain grabber  (they used to be made by ABI) and it slides on to the chain link. The lines are attached via thimbles and shackles, which are wire tied to prevent them from becoming loose. Our experience has been these are better than other types we have used such as the hook.

We know where the chafe occurs from the marks formed from previous anchoring and we will add about 28-30" of fire hose that our good friend Captain Ray Cope got at Sailorman in Ft. Lauderdale. This is a really cool store with the usual and a whole lot of the unusual, in this case Ray was able to pick up about 25' of fire hose which makes excellent chafe guard. 

Aside from the heavy cotton outside which is very durable, the inside has a synthetic waterproof rubber type coating. We split the hose down the middle and our 3/4' in line will fit nicely when we fold the edges over and sew then together.

To hand sew this we are using a tool called awl for all, a lock stitching awl. We never have used this before so I used my morning coffee time to look at the directions. Ray and I practiced on a scrap piece from an old chafe guard. The tool has a bobbin with wax coated thread which slides through a channel in a heavy duty needle.

The first and very important initial  step is to push a needle through and pull enough thread to the other side; about equal half again as much as the length of the chafe guard, this is used on the back side link into the lock stitch.

Pushing through  all four ends of the folded down fire hose takes some twisting action and once through you pull back slightly to create a loop to slide the coated wax thread that we pulled on the other side when first starting.

Here is the thread being pulled through the loop.

The last step is to pull the two lines and tighten the lock step. I found initially I was placing the stitching to close together and later spread it out to about a half inch between each stitch.
When I finished one I went back and secured the line into the chafe guard at both ends so it would not slip.

The finished product: The first one was done with the black waxed thread and was a bit messier. I thought I would whip the ends but later decided it was a waste of thread and closed both ends with stitches through the middle of the line.
The top one pictured was the second attempt and is a bit neater as my skill level improved.

The theme for the day was knit one, purl two and tell tall tales.
The telling of tale tales was the best part of course.

Who said boating was just fruity drinks with umbrellas in them...???

Superbowl Sushi

There a number of excellent qualities about being in the Bahamas on a boat for months on end. While the local cuisine can be excellent it does lack in a very important aspect; sushi.  We have become quite attached to having a good sushi meal from time to time and if given the opportunity, could make it the mainstay of our diet. So the urge for some has been growing for sometime now that broke through yesterday .  We might be well into island time mon but there are limits. This culinary break out just happened to coincide with Super Bowl Sunday.
Having consumed quantities of fresh and expertly prepared sushi in restaurants too numerous to count, we decided to try OUR hand at this highly revered art form. We certainly knew what we wanted and, in a fit of type A personality characteristics, we researched the process through both several well written books, and of course the now ever useful you tube video. Ray, Captain of our sister ship Copeing is seen studiously reviewing the methods and committing to memory the step by step process,  quickly becoming the master of sushi making.

While never one to be outdone, I diligently amassed the finer technical aspects of the dos and don'ts of the process. I mean, after all, this is serious.  We began by spending some time sharpening our knives to a fine razor's sharp edge. It took a few hours and a dark and stormy but we did it and there are no reports of injury, at least that we would admit publicly.

We amassed all the basic tools and ingredients, including tuna and salmon frozen (sadly), but what the heck, sushi rice, wrappers and veggies.

As in most Asian cooking, a big part of creating the meal is in the preparation. To make our rolls complete we had not only fish but cucumber, spring onions and avocado all sliced thin and long to fit the rolls just right.

Fresh veggies to be cooked later tempura style......

and of course rice, all expertly prepared by Susan.  Now this is not just any rice, but a special rice cooked a slightly different way that when finished includes adding small amounts of seasoned Japanese vinegar.  It needs to be slightly sticky so it will adhere to the seaweed wrap....of course.

It was decided early on upon a division of labor. The guys with the approval of the ladies would do the bulk of the sushi construction and of course the eating. The ladies would do prep work and make sure us guys did not:  a) hurt ourselves with the very sharp knives  b) would limit the D&S consumption until meal time and  c) assure we did not make too big a mess in the galley.  They were successful in some aspects though doubtful about the mess part and we did challenge the D&S limits a couple times.

Susan was so smart in setting us up with two sushi preparation stations with all of the ingredients in between us for easy access. Worked quite well.

Quite pleased with my first assembly I proudly display my mastery...only the paper needed to be flipped so it is on the inside of the roll, got it backwards...I had to take it apart and turn it over and re-add the  good stuff....oh boy.

Such intense concentration and a nice looking roll.  Ray's cool Hawaiian T-shirt added to the show!

Uh-oh got that one turned inside out, oh well it will still taste great?

Meanwhile the girls are starting to prepare the tempura veggies. I mean where else do you use your fry daddy but on the dock between the boats.

As the laughing got louder Jeannie and Renee poked their heads over the galley counter to see what the heck was going on....not quite a sushi bar but it works somewhat?

In the late afternoon Tomahawk pulled in after a day's run from Eleuuthera adding  Tommy and Renee to this brew.

All in all we had a great time and laughed a lot at our own missteps along the way. Normally we should leave this to the experts but there are none around so necessity is the mother of invention.

The rolls were, after all, quite tasty but will not win any awards for presentation as some fell apart from too much rice or just plain beginner's lack of rolling skill. Makes you really appreciate how many Japanese restaurants can whip out rolls in a few minutes that taste and look great.  We will keep at it until we really get the hang of it and become Bahamas Sushi Masters....

Oh we did enjoy the game too, the real entertainment however was in the galley!