Anchoring Nazis and Cuban Weasels

December 27, 2006 - January 5, 2007

Monday, January 05, 2007 - Hamburger Beach Anchorage, George Town, Exumas
By Tom

Happy New Year and welcome to 2007. We are still floating happily about 25 meters off the sand at the Hamburger Beach anchorage in Georgetown.

We celebrated New Years several times yesterday. First up at the Chat and Chill over cocktails and volley balls. After our usual 2 on 2 rituals, a sort of impromptu rum game broke out. The rules closely resembled normal volley ball except you had to play with a rum drink in your hand. Spilling any of your beverage resulted in loss of point and side out. We lost the ability to keep score half way through the first game, so we declared all of ourselves to be winners.

A quick trip back to our boat for showers and a change of clothes before we loaded into the dinghy and motored over to Ollie and Pam's house for more festivities. 5 other couples joined us on Dejarlo and we all brought appetizers. I made grissini's which I think is Italian for "bread sticks with poor shape".

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but Ollie has a sort of drink fetish and is always making fancy drinks that would probably have umbrellas in them if you were in a bar. Tonight's drink of choice was called a Pain Killer and from what I could tell it was 97% rum with some sort of spice sprinkled on top. They were quite good.

Party #2 lasted until 9 pm when St. Francis opened up for a cruisers New Years Eve party. Every one loaded into their respective dinghies and we traveled en-mass to the dinghy dock at St. Francis. By the time we got to the dock we were missing one whole dinghy and then we almost lost Pam over board from another. Of course that amounted to less then 15% of our armada, so the losses were well within the acceptable range.

About 100 people or so showed up for party #3. There was music and dancing for those graceful or sober enough and a good time was had by all. Around midnight we watched some sort of event on TV denoting the passage into a new year and then we drank champagne. After we ran out of champagne, the party started winding down.

Amy and I managed to find our dinghy and after I strapped her to me we had no problem negotiating the mile or two back to our boat. Amy retired immediately to bed, while Milo and I lit the grill, cooked a steak and had a glass of single malt with a nice Cuban cigar.

Mostly we just lit the cigar so we could set it in a make shift ash tray and use it as a kind of incense stick, but occasionally I caught Milo puffing away. He's got a surprising amount of style for a fat quadra-ped with no thumbs. In time, the cigar burnt out and around 3:30 am, Milo and I called it a night.

Outside of the New Years eve festivities, things have been fairly quite down here. There have been a few more conflicts over anchoring procedure in the "holes" behind Chat and Chill that continue to make me laugh.

For what ever reason, several of the old dinosaurs on boats that have been coming here for years think that their continued seasonal migration entitles them to lay claim to the really good protected anchoring spots even though someone else got there and anchored months before they returned.

I've tried to understand what affliction these people might be suffering from, but so far I have come up blank. The day before we left our protected anchoring spot to sail to Hog Cay, a mooring screw mysteriously showed up under our boat.

By the way, I'd like to congratulate Gerald on Katie for being nominated "the most obnoxious boater in the harbour". Gerald and his cronies have pretty much laid siege to all the really good all weather spots on Stocking Island. They even went so far as to board and re-anchor someone else's boat while the owner was back in England so that they could have that space for one of their friends. Nice work, ass.

Don't worry too much, the weasel brigade has assured me that he'll get what's coming to him in due time.

Anchoring Nazis aside, the weather has finally fallen back in to it's traditional trade wind type patterns and lots of boats have been able to make the crossing and work their way down to Georgetown. At last count, there were 205 boats currently anchored in the harbour.

Now that the holidays have come and gone, we are ready to head out of G'town and do some sailing. There is a weather windows opening up on Monday or Tuesday and I imagine we will take it. Stay tuned, hopefully we'll have something interesting to write soon, but then again, maybe not.....

P.S. - Milo says as soon as Castro kicks the bucket he's taking us down there and find a couple of spanish speaking weasels with a good supply of Havana's.....