🌊The Sea State

If there’s such a thing as a postcard week in February, this has been it.

Daytime highs in the mid-70s. Cool nights that make for good sleeping. Clear skies most days and no real rain to interrupt anything.

The wind has held mostly east to southeast, consistent but not overpowering. Elizabeth Harbor has stayed relatively calm, a soft roll under the hull. Enough motion to remember you’re at anchor, not enough to disrupt the rhythm of the day.

And this week, I’ve had company.

My good friend David flew in from Austin on Wednesday, and I didn’t have to tell a visitor they just missed the good stretch. He’s getting Georgetown at its best — sunshine, breeze, and calm water.

We’ve been running the dinghy back and forth to town, to regatta events, and over to see other cruisers. With two aboard I’ve been more aware of the harbor’s surface. A bit more lift on the bow. A little extra throttle to get on plane and smooth out the ride when the chop stacks up on the way home.

It’s been a solid Bahamian winter week. Easy weather. Good company. A harbor that feels alive — exactly what you hope for when someone comes to visit.

📝Harbor Notes

It’s Cruiser’s Regatta Week here in Elizabeth Harbour — the annual gathering that turns a scattered anchorage into something that feels like a small town fair floating on saltwater.

The Georgetown Cruiser's Regatta began in the early 1990s when wintering cruisers decided that if they were going to share an anchorage for months at a time, they might as well build a little community around it. What started as a few informal beach games and sailboat races has grown into a full week of events — sailing competitions inside the harbor, beach Olympics on Stocking Island, music nights, talent shows, and the occasional event that feels equal parts organized and improvised. It’s volunteer-run, cruiser-driven, and wonderfully unpolished in all the right ways.

David could not have timed his visit better.

On Wednesday, I picked him up at Island Boy Cafe, and as we walked up, the guy running the Poker Run, was sitting there watching us. He flagged us down and insisted we sign up. We had about five minutes left before registration closed. So we paid the fee figuring we’d go collect a few cards the next day for the fun of it.

Out of roughly 350 entrants, David won second place.

Four of a kind — jacks — aces high.

He walked away with a Georgetown Cruisers pennant, a very respectable bottle of rum, and a $100 gift certificate to the restaurant at Peace and Plenty Hotel — one of the nicer spots in town. Not bad for a last-minute entry we were practically talked into.

We’ve also leaned into the creative side of the week. On Friday afternoon we dove for conch, came back with a few solid shells, and then brought them over to Da Sandbar. Ron — who makes what might be the best conch salad on the island — showed us how to properly crack the shell, separate the meat, and clean it the right way. Then he made lunch for us and the staff with meat we harvested. Saturday we’ll turn those same shells into working conch horns at the “Make Your Own Conch Shell Horn” regatta workshop. Soon I'll be able to join the dozens of horns being blown as the sun slips below the horizon here in the anchorage.

For a visitor’s first few days in Georgetown, it’s hard to script it better than this: good weather, a full harbor, a regatta win, fresh conch, and a little bit of island tradition mixed in.

Update: Saturday, when David and I tried our hand at making conch horns from the shells we harvested. I discovered I had been a bit aggressive with the hammer used to crack the shell — and managed to destroy the inner structure of mine beyond repair. David, on the other hand, executed with restraint and walked away with a proper conch horn to bring back to Texas. A solid souvenir and a reminder of a very good week to arrive in Georgetown

This week, there wasn’t a song drifting across the anchorage.

There was no guitar on the beach. No speaker humming in the cockpit. No late-night harmony carried on the breeze.

But there was something aloft.

On Thursday night, we stood on deck and watched a Falcon 9 rocket rise from Cape Canaveral, carrying another batch of Starlink satellites into orbit.

I’ve seen launches before. Living in Central Florida years ago, shuttle launches and rocket plumes were part of the horizon from time to time. But this was different. This one climbed high enough, fast enough, that it arced overhead — a bright moving star cutting silently across the night sky above Elizabeth Harbour.

No roar reached us. Just light.

Starlink holds a particular place in my story. When I first heard about it, that was the moment living aboard full time while continuing to work remotely shifted from romantic idea to viable plan. Reliable internet offshore used to mean complicated setups, expensive hardware, and speeds that made even simple tasks frustrating. Starlink flattened that curve.

On a boat, it changes everything.

You can work.

You can call your family.

You can download weather models in real time.

You can follow the news, manage finances, upload a newsletter from an anchorage in the Bahamas.

It quietly erases isolation without erasing the adventure.

Thursday night, my friends Alex and Kaylin came over to visit us, and I made ribs. We ate in the salon, then stepped out onto the deck and waited. When the launch window opened, we watched the glow rising into space, separate, and glide across the sky — carrying the very infrastructure that allows me to live this way.

There’s something poetic about watching the tool that enables your freedom streak overhead in complete silence.

No melody this week.

Just a reminder that sometimes the most powerful notes are the ones you can’t hear at all.

Check out the video of the Falcon 9 launch shot by David from the deck of Celtic Cross.

If you’ve been reading the last few weeks, you’ve probably noticed a trend: I seem to keep writing about conch salad chefs in Georgetown. There’s a reason for that. In Elizabeth Harbor, the people who know how to turn a freshly cracked shell into something bright, citrusy, and perfect tend to sit right at the center of the social orbit.

Ron is one of those guys.

He runs the conch operation at Da Sandbar and does it with quiet precision. Knife work clean. Lime ratio right. Heat from the peppers balanced instead of reckless. When David and I — along with my friend Alex — brought over the conch we dove for on Friday afternoon, Ron walked us through the proper way to open the shell, separate the meat, and clean it without mangling the good parts. Then he turned it into lunch for us and the staff.

He also kept a close eye on me with the knife.

There was more than one moment where he paused mid-instruction and said something along the lines of, “Careful now,” with the unmistakable tone of a man who has seen visitors get overly confident with sharp steel. I’m happy to report I kept all ten fingers.

But Ron’s not just a chef.

Every Sunday there’s the pool tournament, and Ron is a regular — and a serious one. He shoots with a distinctive glove on his left hand, which has earned him the nickname “Michael Jackson” from a few of the other players. It fits. He’s smooth at the table and doesn’t rattle easily. If I remember right, he’s won the tournament twice in a row. One of the few back to back champions.

He’s also knocked me out before.

This week, though, I managed to beat him a couple of times. He wanted to put some cash on the line. I declined — mostly because I prefer my pride dented without a financial record attached to it. Instead, we made a different wager: whoever lost had to jump off the back of the staff boat that runs between town and Da Sandbar.

I finally got him.

Ron took the plunge.

Ron’s good guy. Talented, competitive, generous with his knowledge, and willing to jump off a boat when he loses a bet.

This coming weekend will be my last Sunday tournament in Georgetown for the season. If I’m lucky, I’ll make a deep run.

If I’m unlucky, I’ll probably see that glove across the table again.

Maintenance this week was refreshingly light.

On Tuesday morning, my friend Alex stopped by after diving on a trawler anchored nearby. He asked if I wanted him to check the zincs on my rudder while he was already geared up. I’d replaced those sacrificial anodes during last winter’s haul-out, so they’d been in the water close to a year.

When he surfaced, the verdict was clear: they were just about done. Probably under 15% remaining.

Zinc anodes are meant to perform galvanic corrosion control. They’re the quiet bodyguards of the boat — slowly dissolving so shafts, fasteners, and fittings don’t. I handed him the spare set I keep onboard, and he swapped them out right there at anchor.

While he was down there, he also mentioned the hull was starting to show a fair bit of growth. Nothing too bad, but enough that I’d feel it (mentally at least) once I started sailing in earnest again. He left a tank with some air in it and said, “You might want to look around before you start sailing across oceans.”

This afternoon, Saturday, I took him up on it.

Mask, BC, fins, scraper, brush, and a slow lap around the hull. A couple of months in Elizabeth Harbor leaves its signature — a light carpet of growth, especially along the waterline and the leading edges. It’s always a little satisfying watching it come clean under the scraper. .

I’m planning to move next week, and I don’t want to be second-guessing boat speed, wondering if I should have cleaned the bottom. Better to eliminate the variable.

New zincs. Clean hull. No excuses.

Otherwise, it’s been a quiet week on the maintenance front — which, honestly, is how I prefer it when I’ve got a visitor aboard and a regatta happening around me.

Regatta week changes the rhythm of the harbor. There’s more movement, more voices on the VHF, more dinghies weaving between moorings. The anchorage feels tighter, more animated — like everyone has collectively decided this is the week to step out of their cockpits and into the mix.

It also marks my departure.

As the Georgetown Cruiser's Regatta winds down, I’ll be weighing anchor and turning the bow north. Next stop: Eleuthera — an island I’ve wanted to explore for years but somehow never prioritized. There are several bays along the way I plan to stop in before eventually working up toward Nassau, where I’ve reserved a dock with a couple I met during my 2024 season here. It feels like a proper way to close out this stretch of time in the Bahamas.

Elizabeth Harbour is full — more than 325 boats at last count. A floating neighborhood that swells during regatta week into something that feels almost like a festival built on anchors and chain.

I’ve had a great week with David here, and the timing couldn’t have been better. But alongside the energy and activity, there’s also that familiar internal shift that tells me it’s time to move.

One thing I know I’ll miss immediately is the Sunday pool tournament.

Tomorrow will be my last one this season. I won the first weekend I arrived in Georgetown, which set a pretty high bar right out of the gate. It would be a satisfying symmetry to win the final one before heading north — bookending the stay with a pair of victories. No guarantees, of course. There are some sharp players here, and Ron will likely be waiting with that glove on his left hand.

Still, there’s something appealing about the idea of closing this chapter the same way it opened.

Regatta week is celebration. Departure is momentum.

And tomorrow, if the balls roll my way, maybe a little punctuation mark on the whole thing before I raise the anchor and head north.