Hanging in the park – dan
We had strong winds and rainsqualls the other day. The above picture is what “bad” weather looks like in paradise, still beautiful in my eyes. The rain gave us a rare chance to replenish our fresh water, we haven’t had much rain sine the D.R. Provisions are starting to run a bit thin too. We’ve been living on “ships stores” since we left Black Point. In spite of that Susan has done a wonderful job of feeding us. Some how she manages to whip up something creative for every meal from our stock of canned and dry food plus the last of our fresh vegetables. She’s also been baking some great breads. Last night I made sushi with reheated rice, a bit of lettuce, some carrot strips and sunflower seeds wrapped in nori. We loved it! You know you’ve been “out” a long time when lettuce sushi tastes good.
It looks like we going to end up spending a bit longer at Exuma Park that we had planned; fortunately it’s not a bad place to linger. There are a couple of cold fronts rolling in from the north in the forecast, not good passage weather for us but this is a safe place to hang. Meanwhile a school of young Yellow Fin tuna has taken up residence under Gypsy, we continue to regularly see turtles around the boat and an Eagle Ray jumped three feet out of the water just behind Gypsy, which was thrilling to see.
We did some more volunteer work at the park. This time we worked together in emptying and cleaning a thousand gallon rain cistern. Once empty we moved the tank, excavated the old platform that had rotted and built a new one out of pressure treated 6x6”s. Water is as precious to the park staff as it is to us on Gypsy and it gave us a feeling on kinship to help them out with their rain catchment efforts.
We been reading a lot and some evenings we watch DVDs on our computer. One of the recent ones that we’ve enjoyed was the drama “The Weight of Water”. A lot of that movie takes place on a sailboat. It was an uncanny feeling to be watching the sailboat scenes while on a gently rocking boat, it added another dimension to the movie experience.
