Sailing Ohana

Since we had gone a couple of weeks without filling our water tanks and we were running low on perishables, we were looking forward to a stop in Hopetown. I called the marina to see if they had a slip for us, but it sounded like they did not. It was hard to understand the dock master on the phone but he did say “no” several times, among other things that I couldn’t pick up. When Tommy called later from a phone with a Bahamas sim card in it, the dock master said he did have a spot for us after all. 🤔

We don’t enjoy docking at marinas… It’s usually crowded and stressful with an audience watching from the dock. The dock master implied our slip would be “tight”, so we were even less enthusiastic about docking there. We anchored outside of the harbor, awaiting confirmation that they had a spot available for us, and we thought we might take the dinghy in and scope it out before bringing Ohana in. We had just set the anchor when we heard from Grace that there were plenty of mooring balls available inside the harbor, so we pulled up the anchor and drove into the harbor thinking we might just take a mooring and forget about the marina altogether. After the mooring fiasco at Warderick Wells, I was very anxious about grabbing a mooring ball, but it went smoothly. Once we were secured to the mooring, we were able to look over at the marina where we could see the dock that we would be on. It looked reasonably easy to dock on, so we released the mooring ball and moved to the marina where we docked without incident. We anchored, took a mooring, and docked at a marina, all within about an hour… It felt like some kind of exam! The Hopetown Marina is lovely and has a pool that we were excited about.

A lot of the Abacos were destroyed by Hurricane Dorian in 2019 and some areas are still totally decimated, while others have rebuilt or are in the process of rebuilding. Hopetown has a lot of rebuilt and restored properties, and is a fun town. The Abacos are more Americanized than any of the other Bahamian islands we have been to, but Hopetown still feels quaint and funky.

We bought some groceries at the tiny grocery store and walked around town for a bit. There is a store called Sailbags here where they make really fantastic bags, purses, dog leashes, etc. from donated sails. We wanted to donate a spare old sail that is in the deep storage on our boat, but we were to lazy to drag it out of the boat, into the dinghy and to the shop in the hot sun. The afternoon was spent at the pool with the Barnett family and a kid boat from Colorado who we met on Eleuthera. We had access to the very fancy showers in the marina, so Susie and I were thrilled. As always, Morris made friends and had a fan club everywhere he went. A delicious taco dinner on Grace ended our single day in Hopetown.