Three legged dog eyes chicken legs…

We left the Turks and Caicos Yacht Club to head over to Turtle Cove Marina, just a couple of miles away, to clear in at Customs and fuel up for our Dominican trip. Once again, we tried to locate Sellar’s cut, we proceeded to the waypoint we reached the previous day and even in bright daylight we could not locate the entrance markers.
Backtracking and circling around we just couldn’t find them. Gary S called the marina and after a brunt conversation, he attained coordinates for the channel. Plugging them into the computer, Bobby slowly moved the boat toward the coordinates. Finally after much searching we found these little bouys no bigger than a lobster pot marker marking the entrance to the channel.

As we approached them, I stood on the pulpit and helped string the channel together as we spotted one after another leading us through this sometimes very narrow, shallow and very windy entrance. Coming up on two sets of buoys that were very close together, an oncoming boat stood off as we made our way between them. As we proceeded, I felt a little thud from the bow and so did Bob and Gary S. We all thought it must have been a wave slapping the side of the boat. The wind was still howling pretty good and since our next passage was 175 miles across open sea and we were going to get a late start because of fueling and customs, we decided to wait out the weather since it was going to lie down the next day. It took a couple of hours to clear customs and fuel during which time we had to remain on the boat. Bobby and Gina bandaged the broken vase on the palm tree. Finally we were cleared, fueled and docked in our slip. There was a Tiki Hut in the Marina and we decided to get a light bite and a few cocktails as we relaxed from the previous day’s stresses. We found a pretty good cocktail on the menu, an “island smile”. We had the bartender slightly modify it, no grenadine and add a Meyers floater. After a few of those the island wasn’t the only thing smiling. We had the best cracked conch that any of us had ever tasted and the shrimp wrapped in bacon with a BBQ sauce was scrumptious. We headed back to the boat. Just prior to heading up to the Tiki Hut earlier, Bobby had noticed that the charge on the port batteries didn’t seem to be working. The batteries were completely dead. Which explained another story why the CO detectors were beeping when we were trying to clear the shower sump drains earlier. We thought we had reset the charger and had let it charge while we were at the hut only to find that the batteries were still miserably dead. Into the bilge Bobby went. After a bit of investigation, Bobby pronounced the charger kaput. Fortunately, he had a spare on board from his long cold New England winters. He decided to replace it. This charger was in a very difficult location to reach. In the torrid heat it was a very difficult proposition to remove and replace. While Bobby was removing the charger, this three legged dog came along and started barking at him. I was wondering why the dog was barking… well a picture is worth a thousand words. Captain Chicken Legs was busy at work. It was Gary S’s last evening aboard with us since he had previous engagements planned and was flying out the next afternoon. After my American Chop Suey and Gary S’s Chicken Stroganoff there was no way Gary S was about to leave without a meal of Gina’s Gnocchi. We ate drank and made merry, tomorrow the weather was going to be perfect and we needed an early start.