Our month of June has been spent learning more about The Grand Bahamas Island as well as our neighbors. The cruising community is SMALL. You run into the same boats along the way and while at a slip in a marina…the community is down right TINY. And, life on the island….well, let’s say that it is very connected.

The first week at the dock a Sunday night potluck dinner was planned. Happy hour (drinks and snacks) and potlucks are the highlights of cruising. If you leave the dock make sure you have plenty of snicky snacks and potluck makings as you will be sure to need them! So, we all meet at the far pool for the gathering and we get to meet some of our neighbors we hadn’t met yet. The picture is of the second potluck, which is much smaller as people leave for the summer months!
Barry (of Dee Dee and Barry previously mentioned) loves to greet newcomers with the question, “Have you ever met a pirate?”! What we didn’t know is that Pirates of the Caribbean – Dead Man’s Chest was filmed right here off The Grand Bahamas Island. They used locals for many of the pirates because the first week of filming on the rough seas wasn’t meant for some of the Hollywood types cast for the parts so they quickly packed their things and went home!
Well, as the month has passed we have now met our fourth ‘pirate’. These guys had a blast doing the film and the camaraderie still remains. Tom (curly hair) and Barry (grey hair) live at our marina, the other Barry lives in Old Lucaya Village and Jim (who we met last night at the Sand Bar) lives on the island. These guys look pretty darn respectable so it is amazing what the make-up artists could pull off. Every day they would show up at 6am, spend 2 hours in make-up and then potentially end up shooting only a 10 minute segment! Here is the cast of characters!














It has been three weeks and we decided it was time to leave the dock for a sail! We have some really nice ‘time-share’ folks near our unit and they have two 13 year-olds so we invite them to join us. They are so excited because they have never been on a sailboat! We offered Dramamine to the crew before we left but everyone declined. Well, we ended up on a short cruise when one of the boys had to use our stern rail waste basket and then his aunt started looking a bit green around the edges! Ah, but what fun we had watching those two boys all week diving for conch and lobster as well as fish for grouper, trigger fish, hog fish, margate and flounder. We were even invited to join them for a fish fry where we sampled all the fish!