Tuesday a new cold front arrived right on schedule, and it wasted no time reminding everyone who’s really in charge. The wind clocked east as forecast, and while the spot I moved to before the last blow doesn’t offer much in the way of protection, it does offer room. Space to swing, room to maneuver, and options if something changes. As the breeze built through the morning, you could feel that low-grade alertness settle in across the anchorage. Radio chatter increased and people warned about boats drifting too close or dragging anchors.

With the chop building, I hauled the dinghy out of the water. I’ve got a simple setup using one of the mizzen halyards to lift it alongside the boat, snug up against the lifelines. It keeps it from getting slammed around when the harbor starts to boil, which it definitely was by then.

As the afternoon went on, the anchorage began re-positioning. Several boats lifted and moved away from the dense cluster anchored off the more popular beaches. There’s always a pull to be close to the action, close to the action and the crowd. But when it’s really blowing that density starts to feel like a liability.

Late Monday evening, a significant solar or electromagnetic storm occured—one of those solar events capable of interfering with satellite systems. At the time, I didn’t think much of it. I had seen a news report mentioning the how visible the aurora borealis lights would be. But as the wind strengthened overnight Tuesday, GPS-based anchor alarms began going off for a lot of people. By morning, posts were showing up in a Bahamas and Caribbean-based Facebook group, sailors scattered across the region all describing the same thing: anchor alarms screaming in the middle of the night even though their boats hadn’t actually gone anywhere.

Mine went off six times. Each alert snapped me awake, heart rate up, only to find that relative to the boats around me, nothing had changed. My visual bearings were steady. The spacing between hulls was the same. What had changed was the GPS data—erratic jumps and sudden position shifts that didn’t line up with wind, current, or any normal swinging pattern. It was noisy data coming in from space, not movement through water.

By mid-morning, as the wind really started to build, that same issue showed up again. On the screen, it looked like we slid about fifty feet. Under normal circumstances that would be an immediate red flag. But once again, it didn’t add up. The swing radius was consistent, and my position relative to neighboring boats hadn’t changed in any meaningful way. The only thing moving was the reported GPS fix itself.

Winds ran in the mid-20s, gusting close to 30, and peaked around 35 later this afternoon before easing overnight. By Wednesday afternoon it was back down in the mid-teens. Until then, it’s very much a “stay put and tend the boat” kind of day.

📝Harbor Notes

Elizabeth Harbor sits remarkably close to the Tropic of Cancer, that invisible line wrapped around the planet at roughly 23.4 degrees north. It’s one of those geographic facts that doesn’t mean much to many. I'm right on the edge of where the sun’s behavior changes, right at a latitude that sailors have paid attention to for centuries.

That proximity got me thinking this week about skills—particularly the older ones. The kind some people might call archaic now, but that were once the difference between finding land and disappearing into the ocean. About five years ago, on a passage to Bermuda, I had my first real introduction to celestial navigation. Enough to understand the concepts, enough to appreciate how powerful it is—but like any perishable skill, it faded quickly without regular practice.

Since then, I’ve sat through webinars, read books, watched plenty of YouTube videos. All useful, but none of that replaces actually doing it. As I start thinking more seriously about longer passages, it’s been nagging at me that this is a skill I want back in my hands, not just in my head. Sitting here in Elizabeth Harbor felt like the right moment to dust it off.

One of the foundational exercises in celestial navigation is the noon sight. It’s deceptively simple: start with your dead reackoned longitude to get local noon, measure the angle of the sun above the horizon at local apparent noon—the exact moment the sun reaches its highest point in the sky. 90 minus that angle tells you the zenith distance between you and the point on Earth directly beneath the sun. Add (or subtract) the Sun's declination found in the nautical almanac, and you end up with your latitude. (In this case, I wasn’t relying on true dead reckoning—I pulled my starting position directly from GPS so I could test the process as cleanly as possible and see if I could get back to the same answer.)

Before reliable radio signals existed onboard ships, this was how oceans were crossed. Sailors from Europe would work their way down the coast of Africa until they reached the latitude of their destination in the Caribbean, then turn west and sail along that parallel. Each clear day, they’d take a noon sight to confirm they were still on the right line. Before accurate time keeping could be taken to sea, longitude was guesswork, but latitude was something you could hold onto.

So this week, I broke out the sextant. First step was figuring out when local noon would actually occur—because noon is almost never at twelve o’clock. Using my known position from GPS (again, cheating a little on purpose), I calculated when the sun would pass directly overhead. For timekeeping, I set my watch using the atomic time signal I receive over SSB radio from Fort Collins, Colorado, so in theory both my position and my clock should have been as accurate as I could reasonably make them.

I took a series of sights starting a few minutes before local apparent noon and continuing a few minutes after, watching for the moment the sun reached its peak in the readings. Then I took the numbers to paper.

I’ll admit, I surprised myself. The math came back clean. The result put me at 23.30 degrees north— exactly where I knew I was. Given the inputs, it’s where I should have ended up, but there was still something deeply satisfying about watching the process close the loop.

It was a small exercise, but a meaningful one. In an age where a blinking screen tells you everything you think you need to know, there’s something grounding about pulling your position out of the sky with your own hands. And in a real pinch, it’s the kind of knowledge that can mean the difference between making landfall and sailing quiet circles under an indifferent sun.

I’ve been a John Prine fan for a long time. I discovered his music years ago, but it wasn’t until after he died in 2020—right around the time I started playing regularly in Austin with the Dale West Band—that his songs really worked their way into set list. One of the tunes we played in his honor was Paradise, and it quickly became a staple. It still is.

This Wednesday, at our afternoon jam session, I heard a Prine song I somehow had never heard before. Ridiculous in the best possible way. Let’s Talk Dirty in Hawaiian. I didn’t know much about its history, and I didn’t bother researching it. I just knew I wanted to sing it—and include it here.

Saturday morning, before recording, I took the dinghy over to the sound side of Stocking Island to do a little free diving for lobster. Nothing deep—fifteen, maybe seventeen feet—just poking under rocks in places that looked like somewhere a lobster might choose to live.

On one of my descents, I felt a sharp pop in my ear. I knew immediately what I’d done. I haven’t been diving much the last few years, and I didn’t equalize fast enough. A ruptured eardrum. Painful. Disorienting. A quick wave of nausea followed.

I got myself back into the dinghy, returned to the boat, and took it easy for the rest of the morning.

But I’d already decided I was going to record the song.

If you’ve never ruptured an eardrum, it feels like you have water stuck in your ear—because you probably do. Singing that way is strange. Your pitch wanders. Your sense of tone gets unreliable.

So this recording isn’t perfect. I had trouble hearing myself. I struggled to lock in the notes.

I hope you enjoy it anyway.

—John Prine, Let’s Talk Dirty in Hawaiian

This week, rather than a single face or story, I want to highlight the mix of people that stands out to me here in Georgetown —the recurring archetypes that shape the rhythm of the harbor and the town around it.

First, there are the boaters. This place is a magnet for them, and they arrive in every possible form: sailboats, powerboats, trawlers, large yachts, small yachts, everything in between. Even within that group, there are layers. Some are clearly just passing through, here for a few days or a couple of weeks on their way south. Others settle in for the season, anchoring in familiar spots, falling in for the season - the cruisers who’ve been spending winters here for decades. They know every cut, every shift in the bottom, every anchorage trick. Their knowledge is deep and practical, earned over many seasons, and it quietly anchors the cruising community itself.

Then there are the tourists. They come in waves, usually for a few days or a week, staying in the hotels and riding the water taxis over to Stocking Island. You can almost always spot them right away—either still a little pale or already leaning hard toward sunburn. They move differently, look around more, take pictures of things the rest have started to take for granted.

Another group sits somewhere in between: the expats. These are the people who, at some point, chose to make this place home. Often they’ve had some success elsewhere and were able to buy a second house or relocate entirely. Many have been here for decades. They came from another country, learned the rhythms of the Bahamas, and built a life here that’s neither fully local nor fully foreign anymore. They’re woven into the fabric in their own way.

And finally, there are the locals—the Bahamians themselves. Over the last month, as I’ve gotten to know several of them and interacted more regularly, I’ve become aware of an undercurrent that’s harder to define: a sense of how I’m being seen. Not in a hostile way, just an awareness that as a boater, I’m arriving into an already layered dynamic. Recently, a couple of expats referred to me as “one of the cool boaters.” I took it as a compliment, even if it quietly suggested that not all boaters are viewed the same, and that there may be some accumulated friction beneath the surface.

I’ve made plans to go lobster diving with a couple of locals, and I’m clear-eyed about what that represents. For them, it’s primarily work, a source of income, not a social outing—and I respect that completely. If I’m going to enjoy what this place offers, supporting the people who live and work here feels like part of the responsibility, not an obligation.

This year marks the first season that cruising permits and boating-related fees were raised significantly. Personally, I’m all for it. Last year, if I remember correctly, I paid around three hundred dollars to clear in and cruise here—essentially buying the privilege of spending months fishing, diving, gathering conch, and anchoring in some of the most beautiful water I’ve ever seen, just 150 to 200 miles off the coast of the United States. Most people have to travel halfway around the world to find conditions like this. Seen in that light, the new price of admission still feels like an extraordinary value, and one the Bahamas absolutely deserves.

There’s been no shortage of negative feedback on social media, people saying they simply won’t come anymore because the fees are higher. In my case, they were almost five times what I paid before. Even so, it still strikes me as fair. This place, its waters, and its way of life are the very reason people come here in the first place.

All of these groups overlap here, day after day, sharing the same water, the same beaches, the same narrow strips of town. Watching it all play out has been one of the more fascinating parts of being here—less about any one person, and more about the currents between them.

Over the last month here, I’ve had a nagging concern about the dinghy—specifically the outboard. Being around other boats all the time makes certain things hard to ignore, and one of them is the telltale. You can usually see a healthy stream of cooling water coming out the back of most motors, water that’s done its job cooling the engine and is being pushed back into the sea. Mine never quite looked right. The flow was weak, almost tentative, and it kept catching my eye.

Back at the end of December, I’d called an outboard specialist in Fort Lauderdale. I asked him directly about it. His take was that the Honda doesn’t push a lot of water through the telltale, and that the motor would protect itself if there was a real problem—which is true. If it overheats, it shuts down. I ended up confirming that the hard way one day crossing Elizabeth Harbor toward Georgetown. The motor shut itself off mid-harbor. Let it cool for a couple of hours, and I’d get maybe ten minutes of run time before it shut down again. That’s not an operating mode; that’s a warning.

If you look back at the video I took last week while flushing the motor with a bucket, you can actually see it. There’s barely any water coming out of the telltale. At the time, I wanted to believe it was normal. After being stranded once, I knew better.

Before leaving Florida, I’d put together a decent kit of spare parts for the outboard, including an impeller. So I grabbed it, watched a quick YouTube refresher on dropping the lower unit on a Honda 20-horsepower, and took the dinghy into the beach with my tools. With the motor tilted up, I pulled the lower unit. It was surprisingly straightforward—about ten minutes of disassembly to get to the impeller housing.

The impeller itself told the story immediately. It was chewed up, worn, and clearly overdue for replacement.

I put everything back together, feeling pretty good about the fix, and fired the motor up—only to realize I still didn’t have the water flow I expected. That’s when I knew I’d missed something. Fortunately, I had another lifeline: a Honda dealer in Palatka, Florida, I’d spoken with back in November. I gave him a call, explained what I’d done, and he zeroed in on it immediately. Drop the lower unit again, he said, and make sure the water pickup tube is properly seated into the impeller sleeve.

Sure enough, it wasn’t.

The second teardown confirmed it. I’d missed aligning the pickup tube into the sleeve that feeds water into the engine. Once I corrected that and reassembled everything—carefully this time—the difference was immediate. I restarted the motor and got a strong, steady stream of water out of the telltale. Exactly what I’d been hoping to see all along.

Check out the flow below

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about what comes next after Georgetown. In the near term, the plan is simple enough: more time in the Bahamas. There’s still plenty to explore here, and next week I’m leaning toward a hop down to Long Island, just south of Exuma. I’ve heard good things about the fishing there, and a local captain—someone who’s been running these waters for forty or fifty years—was generous enough to share a few spots worth checking out.

One thing that’s become increasingly clear is that my solar setup isn’t cutting it. I don’t have enough wattage on the arch to keep the batteries comfortably topped off, which means I’m running the generator more than I want to just to charge the batteries. It works, but it’s not how I want to operate long-term. So this spring, I’ll likely point the bow north toward Virginia Beach, VA. I’ve got a friend sthere who’s solid with fiberglass and deck work, and that stop serves a very specific purpose. Where the solar arch ties into the deck, it’s lifted some of the decking, and that needs to be properly repaired and reinforced before I even think about adding more weight. I can address the deck work and upgrade the solar panels at the same time.

I’ve also tracked down a distributor with the panels I want to upgrade to, which makes that stop even more practical. Realistically, it’ll probably be Bahamas to Florida for a brief pause, then on to Virginia Beach to regroup, repair, and upgrade—structural first, solar second, in that order.

From there, the horizon stretches much farther.

The longer arc points toward Halifax, Nova Scotia. That’s where things start to feel more serious. This summer, I’m planning my first transatlantic passage—to Ireland. The exact route is still very much a work in progress, but one option that’s appealing is Halifax to the Azores, then on to Ireland. Breaking it up that way shortens the required weather window and keeps me a bit farther south, which feels like a good trade. I’ve heard enough stories about growlers (chunks of ice) drifting down from the Arctic off Newfoundland to know that’s not something I’m eager to factor into my first crossing.

Before committing to anything, I’ll do what makes sense: talk to sailors who’ve done it. Get some perspective. Kick the plan around. I’ll likely submit a question during John Kretschmer’s monthly captain’s hour to get his take on the route and see how it aligns with what others have experienced.

For now, though, I’m settling into this new rhythm—still consulting, still helping with the transition after stepping away in December, but with more space to think. The boat feels like home. The days have structure without being rigid. And the next six to eight months, while still flexible, are starting to take shape.

Nothing is locked in yet. These are broad strokes, penciled lines rather than ink. But they’re enough to give direction—and right now, that feels like plenty.