Free at last from Nassau !

Up at 6AM and working on getting the boat ready to leave. Took a load of vegetables to Heather and Gary “Maewyn”, still on the hard at Brown’s, but launching this morning. We pick up some other board oil and transmission fluid and make on last stop at Fresh Market.  The bastard’s ! They have Ben & Jerry's ice cream on sale again. We have to get a pint of New York Super Fudge Chunk, I guess that will be our lunch.  Back on the boat I find a space on the side of our freezer that will freeze meat, I stick the pint there hoping it will still be good after dinner.

Last visit to Starbucks for internet and coffee

We pay up our bill and leave the dock at 10:30AM.  Nice day with light winds so we motor-sail.

Bye Nassau

We get to Norman’s around 5:30.  There are about 12 boats anchored in the channel. There has been a lot of development on Norman since our last visit.  The runway has been extended to a mile long. A pond on the south end of the island has been dredged and they are soon to finish cutting a channel to the open water and build a protected “Keyhole” Marina.  Large piles of sand and limestone are visible miles away.  Hopefully they will disappear at some point. There is a barge quarrying limestone from another small Cay next to Normans and moving it over to Normans.

C46 drug running plane

The C46 aircraft  from the drug running days is still sticking out of the water.  It crashed landed in the lagoon while trying to land on the runway. Interestingly, it crashed with a load of grass. Not Marijuana, grass, real grass, sod to be specific. Carlos (something or other, isn’t every drug runner from Columbia named Carlos !) was looking to sod his lawn and had it flown in.
Carlos was eventually arrested and was extradited to the US and tried in Los Angeles.  Walter Cronkite, a sailor who frequented Normans, even testified at the trial, since he was threatened at gun point to leave the harbor.

A nice evening on the boat at anchor, finally.  The channel at Norman’s has a strong current and the sand bottom has good holding, but that does not keep the boats from moving all over with the current changes.

Oh and the ice cream for desert !  It was becoming Ben and Jerry’s soft serve. Still very good a much better than the chocolate milk shake it would of been by morning.