Position: N27 12.033 W080 15.688
Our first night here on the mooring we’re woken from a deep sleep and hear a sound in the distance – a sort of wailing siren that rises and falls. “What the heck is that?” we ask. Then we hear a low rumble that sounds a bit like a freight train. It grows louder. Could it be some sort of bad weather? “I think tornadoes are supposed to sound like freight trains.” We bolt out of bed, throw open the cabin hatch, and climb out on deck to see what the heck is going on. Oh. It actually IS a freight train. Crossing the automated railroad bridge - it’s usually up, and the alarm warns boats it’s getting ready to close when a train’s coming.
We are lucky enough to be at the edge of the mooring field that’s closest to the bridge and the freight trains rumble by two or three times every night. Now that we have been here for 2 weeks we rarely wake up any more.
“Still in Stuart?” we can hear you saying, “Sheesh!!” Yeah, yeah, we know. You might think we are just messing around. Well, we are, sort of, but this cruising life can be really time consuming, too. Not that we’re in any great hurry, thank goodness.
Mark had ordered some spares for the new engine and Julie had ordered some sewing supplies. We’ve learned that some vendors and shippers are not all that great at actually getting things shipped out and delivered as fast as promised at order time.
The good news is that, because we still haven’t left the US, we were here when Mark’s son Jeseph and his daughter, Tiger Lily, flew in from Hawaii. They had scheduled the trip a couple of months ago, but we thought we’d already be in the Bahamas and wouldn’t get to see them. As luck would have it, our delayed deliveries kept us here longer than expected. So we rented a car last week and drove up to Wilmington, NC for a quick, but very fun visit.The last of our parcels finally arrived while we were gone. Now we’re finally ready to head further South and get positioned for our crossing to the Bahamas when we get a good weather window.
Of course now the weather here is stinky. A cold front is blowing through with high winds and seas so we are stuck here for a couple more days before we can leave. “Schedule” is a bad word in the life of a cruiser - “you can pick where or you can pick when, but you can’t pick both”. Leaving port in bad weather is one way you can run into trouble, so here we sit, hoping to be on our way soon.
Have we mentioned there are probably 15 or more different ways to play dominoes? We’ve been slowly working our way through the list.
Seriously, though, we have met some great people here and have had fun exploring, reading, walking, doing boat jobs, and generally getting in a bit of R&R.
