Jankanoo

Yesterday was New Years Day and we celebrated with the island at their annual Junkanoo.  From the Internet: Junkanoo is a street parade with music, dance and costumes in many towns across The Bahamas.  It was fabulous.  The parade is short, but the parade route is not.  We moved twice to see it three times then joined in and followed to the end.  I will be posting pictures and a video later.  There are several components. First are the dancers in their costumes and face paint,  The youngest was 4 years old.  Then there are the bells, cowbells shaken in rhythm, lots of bells, real loud.  Then the drums, everything from small 6 inch drums played by little boys to 55 gallon drums cut down with a skin stretched across it and played with your hands like playing the bongos.  The combination of the bells and drums in rhythm just makes you want to dance.  The streets are lined with vendors selling souvenirs, food and drinks.  The rum drinks are strong and sweet and the food we tasted was great.  After the festivities we went back to the boat to get ready for dinner.  We had been invited out for a prime rib dinner at one of our new friends (anyone with prime rib is my friend).

Friday 1/2/2015
We got up earl;y to check the weather and get the boat ready to move.  We are planning to move on further south along the chain of islands and needed the weather forecast.  It was a maybe.  Our next stop is south of a channel called the Whale, named for the closest island.  The whale is an opening out to the ocean that we have to go through to get around a shallow area.  Sometimes the channel is very calm and sometimes it has what is called a "rage" which is a lot of big breaking waves.  Today's forecast was for 3-5 foot swells.  It was nothing that we couldn't handle, especially that they were not breaking seas but we decided not to go and get beat-up unnecessarily.  Monday looks like a better day.  What the heck, we are not on a schedule.  We moved from the dock up to White Sound where there is more room to anchor and better holding.  The forecast for the weekend is for winds 10-20 so we want the anchor well set.  After that it was a quiet day aboard getting some small projects done (by Cori) and I finished another book.