A quick hop south with easy wind to Black Point can only be reported as uneventful.     Though perhaps Micah and I would use different adjectives.   I would have said it was perfect, I was tempted to sail onto anchor that is how perfect the wind was (something I had not yet tried) but I was also not going to add that extra stress to Micah’s experience.    Micah’s adjectives likely would have been the same as previous sails in sportier conditions as he seemed to only have one mode!

I guess I learned that it really is not the sea state or wind that makes Micah anxious.   He is anxious the moment we are on the move.   To be honest, he was probably a little anxious at anchor too (because at any time the boat could move or rock or drag) and I wondered if he was getting any sleep at night.

The only thing he requests from me on each trip to help him stay calm is to announce when we are ‘half way there’ and his cheeky addition to ‘please do it with fanfare’.  So, on our sails together I spent most of my solo time thinking of a way to announce the halfway point to him down below in a new and unique way!

An entertaining use of my thoughts while I sailed – and given I only had 5 or so miles to think up my fanfare on this particular passage, I went with a simple choice – the classic fake trumpet noise followed by a ‘Hear Ye, Hear Ye!  5 miles remaining!’.

A pretty simple request to appease someone who is in a bit of a state. 

My main hope for this sail was that my wind indicator would spontaneously decide to resume working and it would be no issue, but alas that was not the case.  It was still giving me attitude.

I was excited to arrive to Black Point, where I had spent a couple of weeks on my last boat waiting on parts for a broken water maker (Black Point has free reverse osmosis water near the dinghy dock so it was a great place to wait for those parts).    However, I did not get to explore much that time as there were many boat projects to undertake.   So this time, when we dropped the anchor, we headed ashore.   We found the best chicken wings in the whole of the Bahamas I am pretty sure, met a bunch of other cruisers our age.   They came from few different boats but one of them was a fellow Canadian that I had been chatting to for a while figuring we would cross paths: Taylor from Taylor’s Travels and her partner Kiki who sail together on her boat Gypsy Moon.

We all went back to one of the catamarans for sundowners and retired to bed dead tired!   It was nice to actually be a little social considering all I normally do is slave away on the boat.   And so many of my cruising friends are much older than me so this group was a breath of fresh air!

The next days projects were lined up already.  Micah wanted to do some laundry and seek out some of the local famous bread – Lorraine’s coconut bread (I was not going to argue with plans that ended with me having clean laundry and fresh, hot, homemade bread with minimal effort).  I would be doing some research on the wind indicator so that when Micah got  back from town he could send me up the mast (something he has done 20 times already while I changed the rigging in West Palm Beach where we met, so what was one more time) to suss the situation out.  Maybe it would be a simple solution!