George Town - Happy Easter

This morning the rest of the cruising community woke up early for sunrise service at Beach Church. "Beach Church" is just that -- every Sunday cruisers get together for a church service held on the beach at Stocking Island. The reverend is a fellow cruiser (which cracks me up!) and he spends the winter here to run the church. Usually it starts at 9:30 but Easter sunrise service was at 6am, too early for us I'm afraid! In my heaven, God doesn't get all bent out of shape if you opt to sleep in rather than going to church. So instead we stuck with the more secular Easter traditions this morning. When Kevin got up, he discovered that the Easter Bunny had hidden the candy bars we bought yesterday all over the boat and he had to find them. Which he did. Good job, Kevin! Then we had a lovely batch of scrambled eggs, our nod to Easter eggs but less work than hard-boiling and dyeing them. For dinner, instead of an Easter ham, we had an Easter pizza (Down to six pounds of mozzarella now...)

Most of the morning Kevin worked to fix a section of the bootstripe along the bow that got torn up by the mooring pendant (rope attached to the mooring) back in Little Farmer's Cay. The bootstripe is a vinyl stripe all around the waterline of the boat. Having a stripe of color (in our case a thick blue and thin yellow stripe) makes the boat look snazzier. But the mooring had torn up a six inch section of the vinyl. Trying to fix it with the boat in the water was a challenge. We shifted all the ballast (spare anchor, sails, and other heavy stuff) from the front end of the boat to the back end to raise the front end as high as possible out of the water. We even filled the dinghy (which hangs from the back of the boat) to add more weight to the stern. Then Kevin got in the water and I lowered supplies down to him to get the repair done. It looks a lot better now. Afterwards he scrubbed along the waterline to get rid of any sludge and salt scale, so add that to last week's rainbath and now the boat looks ship shape!

Then this afternoon we went into town to make a few phone calls. The town was a ghost town, all the Bahamians were at church and everything was closed so there weren't any cruisers either. When we arrived at the dinghy dock we could even hear the sermon through the PA system of the nearest church. Very hellfire and brimstone. But when church let out there was this colorful parade of people all dressed in their Sunday Easter best. Bahamians take church very seriously and usually dress up to the hilt every Sunday, but today was even more so and all the little kids looked so cute in their suits and pastel dresses.

So we had a nice day, despite being far from home. The hardest part of being here is missing all of you, especially our families. It isn't easy to be away from loved ones on holidays, so know that we are thinking of you and missing you.