We’re in Little Harbour again, and the week with my parents is behind us.  We revisited some old places and saw a couple new ones, but nothing that compels us to stay in the Abacos.  We did spend four days in Hope Town (our favorite place, beating Little Harbour because it has grocery stores), but it felt good to leave even there.  We want to keep moving.

So we’ll spend the next couple months moving further south down the Exumas chain.  We seek warmer weather and quieter anchorages in more remote areas.  The Exumas are also a bit trickier than the Abacos and we expect the rewards to increase commensurate to the challenge.

George Town is a cruising mecca at the southern end of the Exumas and we will probably end up there, though we don’t consider that our destination — possibly just because everyone else does.  George Town feels inevitable in the Exumas, the way Marsh Harbour does in the Abacos.  We managed to avoid MH pretty well, only making a couple short visits.  George Town is on the ocean-side and therefore harder to get into and out of, meaning most people get there and stay.  These population centers mean availability of groceries and coin laundry, but so far we haven’t seen a lot of benefit from these get-there-and-stay communities.  We plan to take our time.  We worry more about getting there too soon, and having nowhere else to go, than not getting there at all.

We’ve decided after that we’ll return to Florida.  This trip was to give us all a taste for cruising and trial the boat and ourselves.  Done.  While it didn’t have a specific destination, the trip wasn’t intended to be open-ended.  We also feel like we’re suffering a little bit from a lack of perspective and direction.  So, like Inigo Montoya, we’ll go back to the beginning.  They say home is where your stuff is, and we still have stuff stored in Sarasota/Bradenton.  Tanya fears getting stuck, but I don’t.  We’ll do some projects, make some money, welcome another crewmember, and then do something bigger.  A circumnavigation of the Caribbean perhaps?

The timing of our Florida return may be a bit problematic.  Tanya tells me she needs to be back mid-February, but it was still awfully cold in Florida that time last year.  In fact, a post from Feb 15 last year laments that we weren’t in the Bahamas.  There may not be much we can do about that, and we’ll just have to wait and see.  It seems we’re stuck between two forces of nature.