Just a warning that this post might be slightly lacking. For reasons I am about to explain, I am pretty much dead tired at the time of writing this.

  So, this story starts at 2:00am. Yes, I said ante meridiem. About 4 hours before planned. And while it was a good choice in the long run, it made the day really suck. Now, you are probably wondering what is important enough to leave that early. The answer is, getting to the Abacos islands. Dad and mom apparently couldn't sleep because they were all nerves about the 70 mile crossing. Which, yes, is a large crossing when in the ocean. So they decided to up and leave… at 2:00 in the morning. I, for one, am a very light sleeper. So what with all the rattling and rocking the boat was doing, I couldn't sleep. Hence the problem I reported at the beginning of this post. Devon, who we now know can sleep through explosions, was fine. 





This is a strange celestial body we saw in the sky last night. It appeared to be on some sort of caffeine, and would not sit still when we tried to capture its image. It was defiantly not the product of Mom trying to take a picture of a relatively stationary object while on a moving vessel.

Eventually it was morning, which didn't mean much, besides the fact it was now too light out to stay downstairs. And we were only about halfway there. The waves were still the 3-6 foot swells. The rest of the trip is pretty uneventful; however we did have 2 brief crisis'. The first time was when the steering stopped working. Imagine being out in the ocean- or anywhere, for that matter- and suddenly, the autopilot stops working. You go to manually steer the boat... and you cant. Luckily, all that was wrong was that 1 pin fell out of place (i shall not go into detail because unless you've seen it before, you wont understand, and I'm really bad at describing boat parts..). All that had to be done was hammer it back into place. The second time was when the engine abruptly shut off. We eventually got it working after bleeding it, but it took longer than it ever has before. We aren't entirely sure what was wrong with it.


 Then, of course, was the marina docking, which in itself was pretty impressive, even more so when you remember that we were all half asleep. The wind had picked up, so it was now reaching strong south-westerly gusts at around 20-30 knots, apparently evening reaching 40 at one time (this is why leaving early proved to be a great idea, without all the side effects included. If we hadn't crossed today, we would be stuck in Spanish wells until Tuesday. This would be quite counterproductive.). And, just to add to the difficulties, the marina was open to the wind, so we were being blown in. Then the marina was very skinny, and the slip was very narrow. Then we accidentally went into the wrong slip, and had to pull out again and move. So all in all, it was pretty impressive. I, having the unofficial job of manning the stern line, had to watch as we steadily got closer to the speedboat directly behind us, when we were backing out of the slip. However, it was all worth it, as the marina had a turtle.


We will be staying in this marina a few days, so I doubt we will do anything too exciting that deserves to be written about. Then we are moving up to see those relatives again. However this time, we persuaded them to meet up in someplace warm.