Our smaller adventure inside the bigger adventure is getting closer.
In just a bit over forty days Charlotte and I will be off to the Bahamas to charter a boat, spend lovely time with each other and learn how to sail together. Or, if things don’t go as we hope: enjoy a week of seasickness, sunburns, strange skin rashes, stomach problems and (aww so cute but wait what are they doing?!) angry pigs. It’s hard to know beforehand.
It’s getting closer, though! And we’re clearly getting more jitterish.
Chartering in the Exumas
There are surprisingly few chartering companies operating out of Nassau and New Providence, the most suitable place to start when heading south towards the Exuma islands. We’re using Navtours, located on the southeast side of the island, in the very modern and recently constructed Palm Cay Marina.
The chartering part is easy: just find a free boat on the website and make the reservation. The reservation is confirmed by paying 30% of the chartering fee, with the rest being due about a month before the charter starts.
What isn’t really easy (or wasn’t for us) is to find good flights there and back from very very far away. Most have either ridiculously long flight times (the ridiculous sign lights up when a one-way flight is more than thirty hours), or insanely expensive seat prices.
(Tribute to the movie Spaceballs in the previous paragraph! “We break for nobody!”)
But eventually we hit the ENTER button and so on the 27th of December at 2:10 pm we will leave from Helsinki, fly through New York and Miami and, about 15 hours later, arrive in Nassau at 11:44 pm local time. Just barely staying inside one calendar day 🙂
We’ll take a taxi from the airport to Palm Cay Marina and (as soon as possible) settle in for a good night’s sleep on the yacht we’ve chartered. It’s a Dufour 382 Grand Large and I think it’s the one called Taonga (“a treasure in Māori culture”, says Wikipedia).
Next morning we’ll do the official check in, go to the grocery store and buy a lot of this and that and a gazillion bottles of water, and then … then we’ll hear our hearts beating quicker as we start the engine and the Navtours people start untying our docking lines..
And then we’re away. And out there, all on our own.
41 days to the Exuma islands, and counting. Ahoy, here we come!