Radio back; provisions stowed

Pantry in the shower

Thursday and Friday we worked hard on boat chores, including stowing three crates of provisions in the shower. The dinghy is in the water, and we now use it to get to the marina that has the showers, the one where Indigo is. Early Friday afternoon the radio was reinstalled. We now hear lots of noise on it; before we heard nothing, so it seems to work, but we can't really test it where we are. The tall buildings full of electrical equipment cause too much interference. We'll do a radio check when we leave, before we get very far away, to be sure it's working properly.

We called the weather forecasting and routing service, Commanders' Weather, on Friday and told them we wanted to leave Tuesday. We'll check back with them Monday to see how it looks. There are some lows forecast between the Bahamas and Bermuda, but we figured we'd have to go a bit north first anyway, so we don't know if they'll delay our departure.

We plan to do our final provisioning Tuesday morning: perishables at the grocery store and some more hardware that we didn't think to pick up on one of our many earlier runs to the hardware store or chandlery. High tide is around 1430 Tuesday, and we want to get off the dock at slack water.

We finally talked with Jim on Orinoco yesterday. He's the Canadian/Brit we've been staying in touch with since Costa Rica. He and a couple of other boats are planning to leave "middle of next week," but John didn't confirm what next week meant. It's a little ambiguous on a Saturday. I think it means about the same time as we're leaving, but John's first thought was that it was the following week. We'll talk again and confirm. I don't really want to wait an extra week, if that's what they mean, but we'll see what the weather people have to say about it.

Night on the Riverwalk

I'm going to be posting smaller photos in the blog from now on (while we can still post photos, that is), but you can always click on the photo to see a larger version.