Christmas 2015


Christmas 2015 – Great Abaco Island

 
Its Boxing Day now, it was supposed to be a race day in the Sea of Abaco hosted by the Hopetown Sailing Club, but for some reason at 8.15am it was postponed until next week due to inclement weather.  It would have been a great race day with tons of wind and sunshine – maybe they thought it was too windy, or maybe the organizers were suffering Christmas Day hangover, I know I was, but was still looking forward to the wind blowing away the cobwebs.    Hopetown is a lovely little town on Elbow Cay but not somewhere I would want to be for that much time, so I’m back in Marsh Harbour.

 
Its not that Marsh Harbour is particularly beautiful but it is the hub of Abaco and has the life sustaining facilities.  Its also where I don’t feel guilty about running my generator for many hours trying to get my batteries up to 100% capacity.  I was given a battery monitor by another lovely couple on Sargo, John and Lory.  They didn’t need it and John definitely felt I needed help with my battery situation.   Russ installed the monitor for me a couple of days ago, and now I understand a lot more than just how many volts are pushing through them.  So I’m really looking forward to the monitor display saying the word FULL.  So my very loud Honda generator is still plugging away, the wind is howling and I’m not very close to any other boats, so I’ll keep it going until dark.

 
This has been the first Christmas in 4 years that I have not been working,
which was a good way of not having time to notice my lack of family proximity.
In the lead up to the big day I was nervous that it would be difficult to get through, but I was lucky to spend the past few days with Lisa and Russ from Uproar, who were also spending their first Christmas sans family so we became a small family unit  together.  I was able to get through to all of my kids, except Josie.  It was really sweet actually – we had lunch in the Hopetown Inn on Elbow Cay and after lunch as I was sitting on a very comfortable couch on a quiet patio I looked around to see so many other people on telephones with beatific smiles on their faces as they talked to their loved ones.  Love makes people beautiful.   And I smiled and smiled as I listened to my 2 little grand children, Mission 5, and his sister Isaan 3 fighting over the Lego house they were building.
I plan to be home for next Christmas – with MoondancerX
(sorry for lack of pictures - I'm using data on my phone as my internet connection and its taking too long to upload pictures.  I'll take my laptop ashore and use a better connection to post a bunch of pictures.)

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