A Week Aboard S/V Sabado: 2/21/2021 – /2/28/2021

Did you see this week’s video?

Last Sunday we were still seeing the effects of the cold front. Luckily though, the sustained high winds put our wind turbines to work- we woke up to 100% battery life! So, we made some bread, made some ice, and watched a few documentaries to pass the time.

By Monday the wind had calmed down a bit and the blue skies and sunshine were back. I was feeling a little stir crazy having been on the boat for 3 days straight, so when our friends pulled in and dropped anchor next to us, I couldn’t wait to go say hi! We ended up having dinner over on their boat and chatting back and forth about future sailing plans. We even traded some of our canned olives for some dehydrated mushrooms and coffee beans (a very good trade considering we’ve been out of coffee beans and can’t find any to buy in the Bahamas, so we’d been drinking instant coffee for days)! 

Tuesday morning the wind had officially died. The highest we saw throughout the front was 40kn, so it was nothing we hadn’t seen before! Overall, Black Point was a great anchorage for us, we had a bit of wind chop but no significant swells. We headed to shore to get some laundry done, and ended up at the bar in between loads (classic).  After a beer or two, we got to chatting with the guy next to us who was a local fisherman. He gave us two fresh lobster tails before he left! 

We headed back to the boat for lunch and a nap, then met up with our friends for dinner on shore.

The next morning I was itching to leave, so we motored to Staniel Cay for a change of scenery and in hopes of picking up our new watermaker booster pump that failed last week. We dropped anchor just North of Pig Beach, and headed to the yacht club to see if the part arrived. Turns out we showed up a day too early, but we made use of the trip to shore by grabbing some lunch! 

On the way home we decided to beach the dinghy on cruiser’s beach. It’s a quirky little strip of sand with a bunch of wooden signs with people’s boat names, various chairs and bean bags, and even a swing! We hung out there for a while, chatting with another couple who are also in their first season of Bahamas cruising, before heading home to cook up our lobster tails and watch the sunset.

The next day we attempted to pick up our package again, and luckily it had arrived! We stopped by the store and picked up a few things while we were on shore, then headed home. Ray replaced the old booster pump with our new one, and we ran the watermaker all afternoon.

I spent the rest of the day making a spreadsheet for our planned haul out. We’ve decided to haul out for hurricane season this year. We’re a bit disappointed, but with COVID closing borders left and right, our options are limited. We’ve decided to use that time to get a bunch of projects done though so Sabado will be completely ready for the Pacific, which is hopefully our 2022 destination!

So, I transferred the ever-growing list of projects we’ve been keeping on my phone onto an excel spreadsheet, added cost estimations for labor and materials, and found out our dream list is roughly $6,000 over our ideal budget (oops!). So, between now and June-ish, we’ll be going through this spreadsheet together to prioritize some projects over others and figure out where we can cut costs so we can keep sailing around the world unemployed.

The next morning we decided to motor sail back up to Sampson Cay to check out the sand bar/shallow area, and we were not disappointed!

We had been to this area before, but had never seen it at low tide- it was gorgeous! We hung out on a sand bar and walked around in the ankle deep waters for a few hours. I rescued some starfish that got stuck high and dry before we headed home and enjoyed some cotton candy clouds and a gorgeous moon rise!

The next day we headed back to the sand bars at low tide to fly the drone, and it was definitely worth it:

I spent that evening finishing up editing and uploading our video, while Ray cleaned our eisenglass and fixed the straps on our dinghy.

We’ve got some pretty high winds today so it’s looking like we’ll be staying on the boat- which is probably for the best considering how far behind we’ve gotten on cleaning… but hopefully these winds won’t stick around for too long!

I hope you had a great week! ❤️