January 2007

With the holidays behind us and a new year upon us we’re looking forward toward some new adventures. As we await the longer days we are preparing for our departure to the central Bahamas. Destinations - Eleuthera and the Exumas. Plans are to leave the Abacos sometime around April.

A few things needed addressing before we go and the 1st one was getting a new bottom. The Marsh Harbour Boatyard hauled Escape out on January 8th, sanded and painted the boat’s bottom.

In the travel lift.

Tom also then replaced the cutlass bearing on the prop shaft as well as the mixing elbow on the engine.

Babette enjoyed the availability of fresh water for washing the boat and all the stainless, which then led to some extensive waxing. Boy can Escape still shine!

Escape was on the hard for 5 nights. We chose to stay aboard her which posed some challenges. The major one was that NO water could exit the drains or bilge. If it did the new paint would streak if it hadn’t cured for 24 hours. This stimulated our creative thought processes. We used a bucket for our sink, used a turkey baster to suck water out of the bilge (the ice box water drains into the bilge) before the automatic bilge could kick on and took showers on a pallet with a hose in the yard near the boat. It’s amazing how you can make things come together.

Launched back into the water on January 12th and off we went. WOW can Escape cruise now. We picked up 1 to 1 ½ knots of speed with our improvements. It certainly was worth the time, effort and $$$$. We are very pleased with the work they did.

Shawn, Tom and Terrell.

Shawn called them the human Oreo! Shawn and Terrell worked on Escape.

The weather has been pretty nice lately. It’s been in the mid to upper 70’s most of the time but the frontal winds are brutal. Usually around 20-30 knots so we’ve been spending a lot of time on the mooring. We enjoy every time we are able to escape from it. So right now we are just biding our time until April.