Viva la company!... and fun with lionfish & lobsters.

Well, Cynthia is gone: my bird has flown north (well, her 2:30 flight is now planning to leave 4.5 hrs late), back to the world of wind and cold and work. Her time here was exceptional..... as usual.

First of all, I sailed to Lindberg Bay and anchored a quarter-mile from the airport, then paddled to shore and met her a few minutes after she had snagged her luggage. Exhausted by the red-eye flight following many hours of work, she swam and cleaned the boat bottom with me, then curled up on the bed and slept for hours and hours, finally waking enough to say she did not want to spend the night there.... so we hoisted the sail and headed east (I keep wanting to say “north” since it is upwind and feels like up...which translates as north in my map-mind). We spent the night at Buck Island, arriving just after darkness had fallen, making catching a mooring trickier than usual.

The next morning we headed out again, going as far as St James Island where, exhausted by fighting the intense winds, smashing through the turbulent waves, and dealing with hot sun and (surprisingly) chilling showers, we caught another mooring in Christmas Cove. We ate lunch (one of these days it might be fun to go over to Pizza PI, a well-known sailboat/carry-out-pizza-restaurant there), then went for a nice snorkel/hunt, finding and killing one lionfish.

Anyway, you get the idea: we worked our way up the islands toward home, cooking and hunting and sailing,

 woke Christmas morning at Haulover, where she gave me a coffee mill and beans,

 then we did an early fishless hunt in Haulover Bay, then a later one in Elk Bay,

she found a den in Elk Bay and shot six fish!

 then sailed to Salt Pond, arriving at the Christmas party in Kiddel Bay a bit late, but in time to enjoy the full moon, food, company, and music. That night we "slept" on a wildly rough mooring in Salt Pond and, at sunrise, got another lionfish hiding under a knob of coral.

On her final day (yesterday? Time flies!), we dove Elk Bay where we found three more lionfish in the same spot and she killed two. She also found a very cool slipper lobster...

Then we sailed to Rams Head where she got another two lionfish that had been reported a week earlier... and found many spiny lobsters.

I've never met a gal who can tire me out in her eagerness for the sort of adventures I love. Now I think I will rest for a day.... then off to hunt lionfish, capture and raise monarch larvae (I found at least twenty today), repair my boat, deal with a fungus gnat infestation on board, and dig away at my todo list.