2012-02-10 - to Lee Stocking Island, Exumas

last day of fun at Emerald.  The kids played for so long in the pool that their hands 'pruned'!  great day

Well, we are finally at a turn around and are officially heading home.  We arrived in George Town at the beginning of January.  We had Roxy and Robert visit which was great.  Then, a week later, Kevin and Pat came for nice visit.  We left George Town a few times, once to Conception Island and Long Island but never really far and always returning to George Town.  To keep things interesting in George Town (so we feel like we were moving around), we moved to different anchorages to have a different view, different perspective.  Connor enjoyed the company of other children and we met new friends and reaqainted ourselves with friends we met along the way.  It was also nice to have a regular school schedule and catch up on necessary lessons.  But, now we face north as most boaters here must do at this time in the season.  There are several boats that we have travelled with that also have children that we hope to meet up with soon.  I am looking forward to having new experiences again.  We intend to go up the Exuma chain again hitting some of the sites we missed and revisiting some that we loved.   I also am look forward to getting home and seeing family again! 

So, here we are at Emerald Bay Marina....getting the last of the laundry done, checking email and making a few calls that will be difficult to do in the next few weeks.  Our trusted phone that was bringing in email on the water, sadly is not working....but has been replaced with a phone that send and receive calls -a little bit of a trade-off!   Kerry was also busy this morning looking at marinas in Florida that Hi-5 will call home for the rest of the season.  We are considering several locations from the Keys to Stuart. 

Home....here we come!

.......I will update again once we have internet.....stay tuned :)

...later in the day.....We finally left Emerald Bay for Lee stocking Island in company with Whistling Cay. Makana and another boat Cookie Monster were following closely behind. At Lee Stocking Island there is a marine research station but we are not sure who they are and what they are doing. We later learned that there is a woman who is the caretaker of the facility while there is no research being conducted, but she is 'off-island' right now. As we entered the cut to Lee Stocking we ended up catching a fish, finally. We identified it as an Almaco Jack and we were thankful to have a bit of fresh food on board. We ended up taking all of the kids (ours and Whistling Cay) in our dinghy to a small beach just south of the anchorage. It was beautiful and we found a very large sea cucumber that we could touch. Connor, however, didn't take us up on that experience and declined the offer to touch it. Later, we went to Whistling Cay in the evening. The kids watched a movie and we said our good-byes. They are soon heading back to Florida so that they can store their boat and head back to Alaska for the salmon fishing season.

Dylan checks out the sea cucumber!

Connor decideds to pass on touching the sea cucumber this time....