Friday, May 08, 2009 5:40:17 PM Location: Staniel Cay, Big Major Anchorage Latitude is 24 degrees 11.047 minutes north. Longitude is 76 degrees 27.731 minutes west. This weather observation was taken on Friday, May 08, 2009 5:39:55 PM local time. Observation location: Staniel Cay. Latitude is 24 degrees 11.046 minutes north. Longitude is 76 degrees 27.727 minutes west. The air temperature is 80, and water temperature is 0 degrees fahrenheit. The forecast is Sunny. The current weather is dry. The sky is scattered clouds (10 - 50% clouds). The wind is 5 knots from the east. The visibility is 10 nautical miles. The wave height is 0 feet with 0 foot swells. The barometer is 1020 millibars and steady. Nicholas and I had an easy ride today. The wind was less then 10 knots out of the SE and the waves were only 2-3 ft and also out of the SE. We had a 50 mile trip to the NW and glided over deep blue water at 7 knots and the birds up. That was nice. At the beginning of the trip we had to negotiate a shallow path from behind Stocking Island to the open water, and at the end we made our first trip over the "banks". It was only about 10 miles, but unnerving none the less. We saw as little as 4 ft under the keel but most of the trip was with about 8 ft of crystal clear water under us. Fortunately the bottom was flat as a board and gradually rose and sank. There was about 10 knots of wind, but the banks kept the waves to nothing. Also, having good charts was comforting. The Explorer Charts are the bible here and Maptech incorporated all the routes and waypoints in their package. That took a lot of worry away. We dragged a line, but only caught sargassum weed. It builds on the birds too, but is a much better problem to have than kelp. Nicholas slept for almost the whole trip. I dozed and read my book. This morning was some disturbing news on the VHF. Yesterday I heard a frantic Mayday call that you could almost not understand the guy was so frantic. There was some vague reference to a shark bite second hand. Well this morning we heard the scoop. A guy was snorkling off one of the islands and a bull shark took his forearm. Nasty. The locals went hunting today. There are two other Nordhavns here. One is another 46 with San Francisco as their hailing port. I'll check them out tomorrow. The other is a 62 and their hailing port is Andover ?? The anchorage has a nice sand bluff on the North, East and SE side for protection from wind and waves. It is very quiet here. The temperature really gets nice here after the sun goes down and sleeping is very comfortable. There are no bugs. We are anchored in 12 ft of clear water. Some people I met in Georgetown are coming over in a few minutes. They have a Benetau 41 and are interested in St. Marys GA as a potential place to put down roots. He is a motorcycle rider so we will have plenty to talk about. All is well. David Powered by BoatExec http://www.BoatExec.com