Farewell to Bimini

 

We stayed a new marina this time call Blue Water.  It was a nice marina with docks in good condition.  The had pretty good Wifi access as well, although I had to sweet talk the lady in the office for the code, as she usually keys it into the individual laptops herself as an added measure of security.  I told her that my boat has a fixed system and with a tilt to her head she nodded and wrote it down for me. It was much better than the highjack signal from the next marina over.

It was sad to learn that Sara’s End of the World Bar was closed for good.  There was speculation that the rent was high which is funny as it is also known as the Sand Bar since the floor is literally sand. There were many businesses closed down since the last time we were there as the tourist dollar has been quite elusive for the last couple of years.

On another note, the musical entertainment from Bimini Stevie S, is in some legal problems and is currently incarcerated so there was no more “Shake it Up, Shake it Up” live at Big Johns.

I spent the entire weekend trying to figure our my dinghy problems.  I had this motor serviced early last year and only put on about 2 hours of operation since then so I was really bummed when it did not start.  I pulled the cord so many times, that I wore through my skin on two fingers of my right hand and one finger of my left. I cleaned the carburetor about 6 times, dumped my fuel and refilled the gas tank, changed out the spark plugs and finally got it to start and idle.  I took it on a test drive and by the time I came back it would not idle and eventually it would not start.  So I loaded back onto the swim platform and decided to deal with it in Nassau where there is a Yamaha dealer.

We finally got over to Sandra’s place to visit her as well as our friend Nikia.  Nikia has been a little busy as she now has a new daughter and a new husband.  We met him the last time we were in Bimini and he seemed very nice. Once we drank every beer Sandra had in the restaurant, including the extras that were brought in for us, we decided to kidnap (willingly of coarse) Nikia as we promised our friends from “The Office” we would go to their boat for cocktails and food at 5:00PM.  It was after 6:00PM when we left, but there was a huge downpour as well as a small plane crash on our end of the island.  I heard the plane in the clouds just before we heard about the crash.  Unfortunately there were some casualties in the crash, but we don’t have many details on it.

I went to “The Office” first with 2 bottles of wine as an apology.  As I was talking with John and his guests Neil and Carol, it turned out that Neil was a Navy test pilot and our neighbors Any and Jennifer actually bought a house from them back in 1974.  It is amazing to actually see the six degrees of separation hit real close to home.  If you want to follow their blog it is http://2010Bahamas.blogspot.com.

As we were preparing to leave the marina we got a knock on our boat with our slip neighbor informing us that the power pedestal we were plugged into was on fire.  Our plug was burning as well.  We extinguished the fire (right after I put some clothes on) and I decided to reel the cord in and deal with it in Nassau.  I knew I had spare plugs on board, so we just ran the generator for now.

 

So that was our send off so we left Bimini with less things working that when we arrived.