We forgot to mention that one of the chores that Eric had done a few days ago was change the generator oil. Today he put away the tools. Eric frequently says that in boat maintenance, getting everything out and putting it all away again often took longer than the task itself. Eric also spent some time in the morning trying to figure out why the air conditioner in the salon mysteriously stopped working. He cleaned the sea strainer and checked the oils, but didn’t see a problem.
Today the wind was dead and the seas were completely calm. Here was our flopper stopper.
On Thursday, December 25, 2025, Christi woke up at 0500, before first light. Warderick Wells basically has zero lights and it was cloudless (which was rare), making the stars especially vibrant. She sat outside for a few minutes and saw a shooting star! This was the dawn.
Some of the other parents organized a scavenger hunt around the island for the kids. in the morning, Keith went on the scavenger hunt. Here was a shot of the group.
On Wednesday, December 10, 2025, we woke up wondering if the Apocalypse had just happened.
While Christi and Keith did school, Eric removed the salinity probe and cleaned it. But it didn’t help — the sensor still wasn’t working. When he put it back, he tightened it as much as he could to ensure it didn’t leak.
We needed to go to the grocery store. We decided to go to shore at 1130, figuring that would give us enough time to have lunch and do our grocery shopping before the current was too strong in either direction. We somehow made a big mistake in calculations. Going in, the current was still strong. We made slow forward progress while the battery power was quickly sucked down. Eric had intended to bring a spare battery for the dinghy to be safe, but when we were about halfway to shore, he realized he’d forgotten it. From there on out, he was really anxious about getting stranded. We made it to the yacht club dinghy area with no problems. It was high tide, and the sea wall was again underwater.
On Tuesday, December 9, 2025, it was raining during sunrise. The view of the sun was completely obscured, but there were some pretty colors prior to the rain rolling in.
Much to our dismay, when we checked the forecast this morning, we saw that it had changed again — the wind would continue to come from the west all day today. Argh. We were frustrated with ourselves for not moving yesterday. When Eric and Keith went to bring in the flopper stopper, they saw this guy was making circles around it.
We immediately moved to the anchorage called Between the Majors on the northwest side of Big Major Cay. It was much more comfortable than the south side had been, but still rolly enough to deploy the port side flopper stopper. One of the issues with this anchorage that had made Eric reluctant to move yesterday was that it had a strong current that caused the boats to swing wildly from one direction to the other, increasing the chance of dragging. And the boats didn’t move together in unison. Some boats moved more with the wind direction and others with the current, so there was a bigger chance of collisions in this type of anchorage. We made sure that we anchored far away from the other boats and that the anchor was set well. This was our view of the anchorage looking northeast towards Fowl Cay.
Wednesday, November 12, 2025 — Christi woke up feeling like she was fighting a cold. It was warmer today than it was yesterday, but it was still too cold for our comfort. In the morning, we drove to Cova for lattes. Christi also stocked up on coffee since she knew finding good coffee in The Bahamas was not easy. Then Eric returned car while Christi and Keith did school.
We spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon getting things ready to go. Since it was a major passage, we had to make sure that everything was put away and securely packed in the cabinets and drawers. Eric rinsed the boat down and cleaned the exterior windows. Even though we’d run water over the lazarette and it seemed water tight, we decided to be extra cautious and put tape around the seals of the lazarette.
We untied at 1500. At first, the ride was not bad. We ran at 1625 RPM and averaged in the high 5s for speed. The sunset and twilight were… striped.
