Days 119 & 120: Mercury in Retrograde

Nassau Harbor Club Marina, Providence Island, Bahamas (docked)

May 14 and 15, 2022

Mercury in retrograde can cause lots of inconveniences like power disruptions and travel issues. I’m not saying that I believe in this, but the time I dropped the rental car keys down the hotel elevator shaft, Mercury was in retrograde.

Mercury went into retrograde on May 10 and since then I have had two phones die. One was only a few months old and the other I had for several years. I also needed to reinstall some drivers on my laptop to make it work. Friends also lost their wind instrument when lightning hit another boat in the marina.

These are inconveniences – we were already going to Nassau so I was was able to get a new phone. For now, my laptop works well. Our friends were able to sail back to the United States without their wind instrument.

It would just be nice if we didn’t have to deal with these things.

There’s so many flowers here. Although we have walked past the entrance to an adjacent hotel a few times, I only just noticed the orchid plants that were attached some of the trees.

Providence Island, where Nassau is located, received huge amounts of rain on Saturday night. There were reports of up to 8 inches in some parts, accompanied by flooding. A waterspout briefly came ashore, too.

Our dinghy captured the deluge. All of the water weighs the dinghy down so John used a bucket to bail it out (we normally bail it out with an old Lysol wipe container). Normally when a dinghy is raised on a davit it can be emptied by opening the drain plug. When we’re traveling we secure our dinghy with a strap that pulls the far side up towards Lailia’s stern so the drain is no longer effective. We realize that we will have to think about how to secure the dinghy when we are sailing or motoring so we don’t add any additional stress to the lines or the davit if it should rain.

All of the rain interfered with getting a mechanic to Lailia on Saturday. Again, this is an inconvenience since we are at a marina. We really didn’t plan to be in Nassau, but it’s not the worst place to be. John and I stopped at a marine store yesterday and bought more fuel line see if we can address that issue, too.

The mechanic actually came today, Sunday, and fixed the problem in less than 30 minutes. Once again, things worked out for us in Nassau.

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If you know John at all, you know of his love of craft beer. There aren’t many breweries in the Bahamas – in fact, we think there are only two craft beer taprooms (both of them in the Nassau). There are two widely distributed Bahamian beers – Kalik and Sands – but it seems that most Bahamians drink Bud Light or Guiness Foreign Extra Stout.

Today we went to one of the microbreweries – Rip Ty’d. The bartender there was really friendly, the beer was good (watermelon pilsner was my favorite and John liked the porter). The owner has a good eye for design, too – this was a really nice looking place.

We haven’t been in an urban environment for a really long time. Even the last time we were in Nassau, we stayed in a pretty small area. We walked a few miles back to the marina seeing more cars than we have seen in months.

Paradise Island and the Atlantis Resort are right across the Sidney Poitier Bridge from where we walked. The cruise ship terminal is just west of this. We saw a different part of Nassau this evening, though. We passed were the working boats were anchored (along with some that are clearly abandoned).

We have some tasks to complete tomorrow: provisioning, changing the oil, and investigating the fuel lines. We also may try to squeeze in some exploration if weather and time allow.

Our hope is to leave on Tuesday to go east and north about 45 miles to Spanish Wells in Eleuthera.