Ivanhoe…that’s his name and his nickname too, showed up 3 hours early to de-barnacle Escape Velocity. That’s a change of pace. He had just finished working on Lenny Kravitz’s boat, who knew? He worked hard but carefully. Money well spent.
Slipping #3 mooring was trickier than usual because of the peer pressure from all the skippers in the field kept making me come out before the storm and reeve another line to the mooring ball. What a mess. Of course it was blowing quite hard which always complicates these things. Marce powered into the tempest and I unwove the cats cradle, I think we handled it well and did our classic pirouette right into Ronald’s fuel dock, we were showing only an eighth of a tank, ouch this is going to be painful at $5.96 per gallon plus four percent surcharge for using a card. She only took 50 gallons. Now dear readers math, not being one of my talents, caused me to scratch head, because we only have a 100 gallon tank. It may be time to find the official Manta graduated fuel stick, every Manta has one.
One last glance at Spanish wells and we were off. As I nosed her out of the inlet, more concerned about shallow water than anything, I noticed that we were running at 7.6 kts with very little throttle. Thank you Ivanhoe.
Our goal for today is to stage ourselves at Royal Island anchorage for an early morning departure in an attempt to get as much Easting as possible before the Trades fill in and make it very difficult to get out to 66 degrees West before we can head South to the Virgins. Yeah I know, It takes patience to sail, this adds hundreds of extra miles.
Other than a narrow entrance Royal Island has a beautiful anchorage, and supposedly Roger Staubach’s resort development company started developing this island and you can still see some ruins and a gone to seed golf course, but first one must ask permission to tour the grounds, what where are we Fort Lauderdale?
As a general rule I enjoy seeing impossibly successful guys screw up but we passed on this one, and stayed on EV. Very peaceful after Spanish Wells. So peaceful there’s no WIFI, no cell, no Sat. phone, no SSB. but it is beautiful. Marce says she hears voices in the SSB radio!
Impossible. 