Poker Guys Redux or Bozo Goes to the Races

May 24 - 31, 2007

Thursday, May 24, 2007 - Hamburger Beach Anchorage, George Town, Exumas
By Tom

The wind peaked last night at just under 40 knots. Thats a lot of wind, but the upside to all the wind is that our batteries are now back at full strength for the first time in over two weeks. The wind isn't forecast to lay down until the middle of next week, so I imagine we are stuck here for a while longer yet.

There isn't a whole lot to report today. The only boat related work I did was to epoxy a couple of cracks and divots in my wind surfer. I did three rounds of patching and sanding, but I think I still need another round of fairing before we can call the job complete. I ran out of sand paper and so it will have to wait until I can get in to town.

Around 4 pm Amy and I went in to the Chat and Chill to have a drink with Arlene before heading up to St. Francis for Thursday night poker. We had 25 players show up, most of them with their significant other so the total crowd with spectators and what not was about 60 people or so.

I was a little worried about doing well when I saw that the 2 guys on Kaleidoscope (Brad and Dan) were back in the harbour. These are the guys who played sort of professionally in college. At least professionally enough to earn the money to buy their boat and I had played against them before and knew them to be quite good.

Fortunately for Team Dream Catcher, they showed up completely plowed and were non-factors. When the dust settled, I came home in third while Amy placed second and our combined efforts netted us forty dollars. Not too shabby.

We got home around 9:30 and I made pizzas for the crew before we turned in around 11pm.

Friday, May 25, 2007 - Hamburger Beach Anchorage, George Town, Exumas
By Tom

Another day of wind. When will the settled weather return? In addition to the wind, last night we had more rain. All of the talk on the VHF seems to be about what dismal weather we're having here. If it ever gets nice again, I predict there will be a mass exodus from the harbour.

I spent the morning making some fishing lures in the cockpit with the weasels. I supply the hooks, the plastic bodies, the wire and the labor, while they supply comedic relief by attacking the lures prior to the installation of the hooks. As near as I can tell if they both attack the lure, it's a keeper, but if only Milo plays with it, I may as well just give it to the barracudas now. Pretty scientific study huh?

Amy spent the morning cleaning our cabin now that the mattresses are both back in their proper places. For the record it looked very nice and smelled lemony fresh. As an aside, at what point as a society did we decided that clean should smell like lemons? Thats just weird man.

I cooked up some trigger fish fillets with rice for lunch as neither of us had breakfast and we were both hungry. In the afternoon, I braved the wind and rain and put on my wet suit and inspected the under body of the mother ship. It's still there and its sporting just minor growth only.

Back on board I took a shower on the back deck in the rain. I looked at it as a chance to save water, but Amy said I looked like an idiot standing there in the rain with my hair full of soap and tourists passing by. I'd like to think I was adding to the personal vacations and they marked me down as "local color". I've always wanted to be local color.

We watched the spot in the sky where the sun should have been slowly drop below the horizon and we called it a sunset. It's been 14 days since we've seen a real one, so now we just make due. Dinner was just cheese and crackers with some pepperoni as we watched the movie An Unfinished Life with Jennifer Lopez, Robert Redford, Morgan Freeman and a large black bear. Amy cried and I cheered for the beer, I mean bear

Saturday, May 26, 2007 - Hamburger Beach Anchorage, George Town, Exumas
By Tom

The wind was below 25 knots this morning so we organized an impromptu volleyball game. It was good to get off the boat and actually get some exercise, but the games pretty well sucked.

We played for two hours inspite of ourselves and then took a swim to clean off the sand and then Amy and I braved the trip across the harbour to get to town. We had run out of rum, potatoes and sand paper and that was enough to constitute an emergency on board. We also gave Josh (Kaleidoscope) a ride over as his dinghy and engine combination would not allow him to make the trip safely.

Once our shopping was done, we retired to Eddie's Edgewater for a beer and to await Josh's return from the internet shack. While waiting I watched Johns Hopkins lacrosse team beat the snot out of Delaware in the semi final match. They now go on to play the pseudo-rapist Duke Blue Devils for the national title.

We got back to the boat around 3:30 and stowed the groceries. Both ferrets were awake and insisted on helping. After twenty minutes or so I couldn't find Mila and panic ensued. We searched all of the usual places including the spinnaker bag and the oven to no avail. Finally we found her in the fridge sleeping with a head of lettuce. No harm, no foul. Disaster averted.

There was a happy hour on the beach at Hamburger around 5 that we went in to. It was nice, but it lacked the true feel of a professional ARG (Alcohol Research Group) meeting and we only stayed for 45 minutes.

Back on the boat, I cooked spicy mandarin Hogfish seared to perfection and served over a bed of linguine with garlic bread. There were no leftovers so I am left to assume it was tasty indeed. The weasels and I watched Base-ket-ball (the south park guys) for the 25 th time and I still laughed my ass off. Amy read a book as she does not appreciate fine comedy. To bed by 10 pm

Sunday, May 27, 2007 - Hamburger Beach Anchorage, George Town, Exumas
By Tom

Hello and welcome to Sunday. Today was also the Indianapolis 500 and the Coca Cola 600 (Nascar). Basically my day revolved around the running of these two races.

Prior to race time I spent 3 hours using duct tape, fiberglass, and epoxy to try and fix some of the holes in Eric and Susan's Mako. With all of the rain we have been having, I have had to manually bail their dinghy out to prevent it from sinking. I'm not sure what's up with the Mako, but water in the bilge gets pumped overboard just fine, but water in the cockpit itself seems to stay around, thus creating the problem. I think I need another 2 or 3 rounds of glassing and I'll have all the deck holes fit. Of course, I haven't asked Eric if it's ok to fix the holes, but I'm hoping he'll let it slide.

Anyhow, after two applications of goo and subsequent sanding, I called it a day. A quick swim to wash off the fiberglass particles and I was ready for racing. Amy said racing is boring, so I had to go up to Saint Francis by myself for the Indy race.

I'm not a big fan of Indy cars, but I watched anyway. Mostly I wanted to see how the three women did. For those that are interested, Milka Duno crashed hard while running next to last, Sarah Fischer had a car that slightly faster than Fat Albert rolling down hill and Danika Patrick lost a real chance at a win thanks to her pit crew sucking.

Fortunately, the Nascar race started on time and it was much more interesting. I was really into the race until a spontaneous poker game broke out and I had to go play. For the record, neither Amy nor I did great in the game as we finished 4th and 5th out of 10.

We were back on the boat by 8:30 and I listened to the finish of the race while Amy read and went to bed. The ferrets came out around 10 pm and the three of us (Me, Mila and Lunchbox) shared a rum and pineapple before we all turned in.

Monday, May 28, 2007 - Hamburger Beach Anchorage, George Town, Exumas
By Tom

I woke Amy up early (8:30) so that we could make it to the 9:30 volleyball game. We played with Norm, Andy, Barbara and Cavali Bob and for 2 hours the games were ok, but in the final game I hyper extended my knee and now I fear my volleyball days are over for this season.

I hobbled home and took a swim to remove the sand crud from our games, but my knee hurt pretty bad so I resorted to modern chemistry (drugs) and basically kept a low profile for the rest of the afternoon. The only productive thing I did today was to replace our raw water wash down nozzle which broke last night when Amy was doing the dishes. I couldn't get an exact replacement, so I ended up using garden hose pieces and parts to effect repairs.

Around 5 pm we headed up to Saint Francis to host what I hope is our final poker night of the ending season. Don't get me wrong, I am grateful that George and Jillian have been so accommodating with our card games, but I need a break. For the record, we had 25 players and although Amy and I both finished in the top 6, we both finished out of the money.

Tomorrow we go to town to get fuel, water and green veggies. We're hoping to leave Thursday and head north to get some sailing in. Cross your fingers, the evil weather may finally be over

Tuesday, May 29, 2007 - Hamburger Beach Anchorage, George Town, Exumas
By Tom

Its still blowing like stink here and the average wind speed is still 25 knots out of 110 or 100. I braved the trip in to town this morning to get water, more fuel, more veggies, some rum, some sand paper and a bag of frozen ribs.

Last night, after poker, we were talking with the four guys off of Kaleidoscope and we decided we would have them over tonight for dinner. We were supposed to play ball today, but with my knee acting up I had to call and cancel. Sorry guys.

I alternately chewed on Tylenol and cleaned up the boat so that it was reasonably presentable for guests while Amy made a huge salad, some peanut butter cookies and corn bread. I started grilling our massive quantity of ribs around 5:30 and by 6 Brad, Dan, Forest and Josh showed up. I may not have mentioned it before, but these guys are recent college grads out for 6 or 8 months on a boat they bought with money they made playing poker professionally.

We really enjoyed hanging out with these guys and for the first time in our cruising history, I finally feel old. The Kaleidescope guys are now on their way back to Florida to sell the boat and then enter the American work force with what ever skills they learned while in school. Good luck guys, it was great having you around.

Wednesday, May 30, 2007 - Hamburger Beach Anchorage, George Town, Exumas
By Tom

Dinner last night ran on to 11 pm, which by our standards is pretty late. Amy lounged in bed until almost 10 am this morning, so while she was sleeping, the ferrets and I tried to fill some of the fiber glass holes in Eric and Susan's Mako. I'm guessing the Mako is somewhere over 20 years old, and there have been a number of holes drilled in the deck and the sides in that time.

The last 10 days of rain have led me to believe that if we don't patch some of the holes, the Mako will end up on the bottom of the harbour. Three hours and several thousand micro balloons later, I sanded off the third round of fiberglass patches. I guess I'm about one third of the way done on the biggest holes and I hope to get back to it tomorrow.

After glass work, I dove in to remove the fiber dust and then cooked a steak and shrimp fiesta on the grill for dinner. After dinner we re-watched The Jackal for only the thirtieth time. It was still pretty good.

The wind speed isn't forecast to drop for the next three days, so I have no idea when we might get out of here. Stay tuned, we're leaving soon, I swear. As an aside, Jimmy previosuly from Zealous, but now captain of Illabella returned to the harbour yesterday and he had a cd full of pictures from the Family Island Regatta for me. Most of them were from the boat I raced on and since I haven't taken any pictures this week, this is what you get.

P.S. - For those of you interested, I am the guy in the wild orange shorts with the white flowers and yes, it's true, my mom bought me these swim trunks.