Nassau

In Nassau we met up with Andrya and Chris Shulte, friends of my parents (and now of ours) who have a summer house in St. Andrew’s.  We spent a lovely day with them learning about the island, enjoying their view, swimming in the pool (Emma and Macsen) and lazing about on the beach at their club, chatting and generally having a very nice time.  It was a lovely day and they took very good care of us.

Our outboard motor also needed a little attention in Nassau. The rubber bushing in the propeller was worn and needed to be replaced.  There is, however, no Suzuki dealer in Nassau so none of the ‘mainstreet’  marine stores was willing to take on the job.  Ideally we would have replaced the prop but that would have meant waiting 10 days for one to be delivered from Florida.  So Seb took our broken prop up a dark back alley where there promised to be a shop that could fix it.  About seven guys were sitting around a rather dingy lot smoking illicit substances.  Seb approach one of them and through his missing teeth and red eyes he promised to fix it by the later afternoon.  Unfortunately he fixed it in such a way that it was impossible to install.   Seb took it back to him a couple of times but to no avail.  The propeller was ruined.  They did, very kindly, give us our money back for the job but we were without a dingy propeller and about to head for the Exumas, dingy exploration paradise. Bother!

Our final adventure in Nassau was to the underwater kingdom of Atlantis.  This is a sort of enormous glitzy hotel combined with Disneyesque park with a water theme. Tickets are sold in the casino area where people were already in position to start gambling at 0900 when we arrived.  The aquarium on site was quite beautiful  and there were hundreds of rays of every size belly-dancing through the tanks.  All in all a rather interesting day out with the family.