Vacation

At first, I was going to title it "No free lunch". It looked like Staniel Cay was going to have to be earned. As soon as we entered the bank on Friday morning, around 1:00 a.m., we got a continuous queue of heavy thunderstorm, with rain and lightning, all the way to Staniel Cay where we arrived around 4:00 p.m.
I went to the dock there to learn that they had no fuel and did not know when they were going to have some. I then turned around and went to Samson key that I had never visited before.
They had fuel, and showers, and a restaurant, and WiFi, and a nice anchoraged with good holding opposite the fuel dock.
So we took about 35 gallons of diesel (I won't tell you the price), I bought a 10 dollars wifi card valid for 24 hours and we anchored just across the fuel dock in 7 fweet of sand with extremely good holding.
Obviously, the firt thing I did after anchoring, was to try and get on Internet to post on the blog, get the mail, get a grib, and so on . . . No luck, no matter what I tried, I could not connect. I then concluded that I was probably doing something wrong, which is easy when trying to connect on a secure connection and decided that we would go back to the dock on Saturday morning and find out what I was doing wrong.
I then proceeded to prepare a "Ratatouille nicoise", together with some german sausage, which we helped down with californian wine, and we went to bed, as we were a little tired after this first overnight trip of some 190 miles.
Saturday morning, after a very very good night, extremely quiet, and after breakfast, we worked on the emergency ladder and on the odometer, which had stopped working after Fort Lauderdale.
We found out that my idea of putting the ladder on the transom did not work, but it would work on the side. It actually did for getting in the water and out of it at anchor, but I doubt that it would do for someone falling in the water at sea underway, and trying to get back.
Anyway, we drop the idea of the emergency ladder and kept the one of a swimming ladder which was working just fine.
We then went ashore to clear the mystery of the Wifi. It turned out that the Wifi was down, but if we would come with our computer, we could connect with an Ethernet cable to a connection ashore and do what we have to do. So, we visited the island, found out that on Saturday they had a beach party, with beer at $3. So, no brainer, we will come back for internet and beach party.
Back on the boat, we worked on installing the First Aid kit on the side of the companionway, tighten up the stuffing box and the packing on the rudder post, installed the sun shower and went swimming.
Then lunch and nap. Well deserved. This afternoon, it will be Internet (for grib files and blogger and mail), beach party and beer. Tomorrow morning, we will proceed to Hawksbill Rock and anchor for the night before exiting the bank on Monday through Nuevitas Rocks.