Warderick Wells - Happy Hour

Yesterday we called ahead to Exuma Park to reserve a mooring ball at their Headquarters on Warderick Wells. We are expecting one or two weak cold fronts coming through in the next few days so we will stay here at least until Wednesday. During a frontal passage the wind can clock around 180 degrees from south to north so it is nice to be in a very protected spot, sheltered from all directions. The mooring field in Warderick Wells is pretty strange, there is a deep channel maybe 100 feet wide that has moorings single file. On either side of the channel are sand flats that are above the water at low tide. It is good that the park put the moorings in, since a bunch of boats anchored here would be a nightmare. At least with the moorings all the boats are evenly spaced and have enough room so that their swing circles don't intersect and no one goes "bump in the night". The island here is pretty cool, the wardens have cut hiking trails all across the island so we plan to explore a bit while we're here. There are no restaurants or grocery stores, but the main office does have a "video store" (a shelf of recent and not-so-recent releases available for a $2 rental fee). So we might check that out, too. Neither of us has ever seen that J-Lo movie "Maid in Manhattan", anyone know if that's any good?

When we checked in at the office, they told us that on Saturdays they have a "happy hour" at 5pm. Basically it is a BYOB, bring some appetizers to share, and the park provides a cooler of ice for your drinks. So at 4pm I was frantically trying to come up with an "appetizer". We have very little in the way of snack food at this point. The few snack packs of chips that we bought back when we provisioned in Florida were too valuable to just give away. And when I suggested I bake a batch of brownies Kevin said no way, since the boxes of brownie mix are hard to come by out here in the "out islands". So after racking my brain I came up with cracker mini-pizzas since we have plenty of club crackers, plenty of pasta sauce, several pounds of mozzarella cheese, and we just picked up a bag of pepperoni while we were in Nassau. So at 5:15, snacks and drinks in hand, we dinghied on up to the beach.

We met a bunch of people so quickly I couldn't remember all their names. One couple was actually in Port Lucaya at the same time we were and they remembered seeing our wedding taking place at the hotel. They actually have the same wedding anniversary as us -- Jan 14th. Small world. Everyone was really friendly and soon we were all swapping stories. It was weird though, every person we spoke with at length was fairly new to cruising and had bought their boat within the past year or so. We kind of wondered where all the "old salts" were. It was cool to see so many people from different walks of life (there were people from all over -- Czech Republic, Canada, Scotland, England, US) who have all decided to sail off into the sunset so to speak. We enjoyed meeting a few new friends and since many of them are also heading south to Georgetown, I'm sure we'll see some of them again in the weeks to come.

Where we are:
Lat: N 24 23.831'
Long: W 76 37.952'