Welcome to Palm Beach Shores/Singer Island, Florida, USA

Sun just about to poke over the horizon on Monday, May 19

As we were doing our morning chores, Eric noticed that the water quality being produced by our water maker was not good. He was worried that something in the dirty water here had damaged the membrane, so he shut off the water maker. He also didn’t want to try using the DC water maker, for fear that the same thing would happen to the DC unit. The reality was that it wasn’t viable to stay in an anchorage long without being able to make water, so Eric immediately started trying to find a slip in a marina. 

Eric checked marina pricing and availability online. It looked like the best deal was at a marina named Havn. We felt like that was meant to be. He made an online reservation, then did some calculations. Due to the shallowness of the channels and the difficulty docking in the strong current, we needed to get there at high slack tide. We also needed to be cognizant that the bridge only opened at 15 after and 45 after. He determined that we needed to pull up anchor at 1230 to make the bridge opening at 1245 and then make it to the marina at high slack tide. 

Since we had some time to kill, we went to shore and had lunch at a burger place called Lindburgers. It was good and relatively quick.

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Lunch at The Rusty Anchor and a Turtle on Great Exuma Island, Bahamas

When we woke up on Tuesday, March 25, we saw that the storm had not hit yet. It was an unusual dawn, with the colors darker than normal.

Eric checked the forecast; the storm was still on its way, and now it was supposed to be even bigger than what had been predicted yesterday. The barge was still there, too. On the radio net, someone said the barge was waiting for a tow boat to come rescue them.

It was the hottest and most humid day that we’ve had in the Bahamas. It was so hot that we broke down and turned on the AC – it was the first time that we’d run it since arriving in the Bahamas. 

Eric was still hesitant to turn the Zeus back on. He decided to only turn the power on, and didn’t run it. The first thing it did was demand a software update in order to operate.

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Photos of George Town/Preparing for Storms in the Exuma Islands, Bahamas

On Monday, March 24, the crescent moon was still shining brightly despite the cloud cover as dawn started.

Dawn was spectacular

This morning, Eric called ARCO again and managed to get through to a customer service person. This time, the customer service person did send the schematics over to Eric and told Eric to check the regulator setting to make sure that it was set to Viktron. Eric spent the day mulling over whether it was wise to turn the Zeus box back on.

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Calabash Anchorage, Long Island to Elizabeth Harbour, Exuma Islands, Bahamas

On Friday, March 14, starting at 0100 and lasting until 0500, there had been a full moon eclipse. Had we stayed up and the clouds cooperated, we probably could have seen it from here. But chose not to. When we awoke, the eclipse was fully over and the moon was shining like a spotlight.

Dawn:

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