San Salvador Island, Bahamas

0 nm
Wind: SE 15-20 knots

I’m sitting, as usual, at my computer this afternoon, listening to Bob Dylan sing “Simple Twist of Fate” from the stereo.

“As the light beat through a bust-up shade,
Where he was waking up...”

The light is beating through our bust-up windows, glimpses of baby blue, shielded by heaps of thunderous altocumulus clouds. The sun’s shining brilliantly, though, against our forest-green polytarp Karl has rigged in the cockpit. It rattles occasionally with the wind, and the sun seeps in when we swing to the west, where it’s slowly setting.

Life seems a lot better today. We’ve decided to wait out this weather and head south overnight in the next window. We learned something yesterday, and we won’t take the wind lightly anymore.

Though we did find maggots in our icebox today. Yup, maggots. I can’t think about it too hard or I want to jump overboard and die. I think we may have bitten off too big a chunk when we bought our thousands of pounds of vegetables. Everyday we find something that’s rotting--a couple of rotten tomatoes, a cabbage, some onions or potatoes. We cut off the edges and eat them anyway. I could write a book called “Haute Cuisine at the Edge of Rottenness.”

The vegetables aren’t so bad, though. This was the eggs. I had the least worry about the eggs, because we’ve kept them on the boat unrefrigerated for over two months, and we’ve read about other people who have, too. But Karl opened a dozen this morning to find them in some ungodly state of rottenness, rottenness I don’t even want to know about for fear it would mess with my head. He showed me some of the others, crawling with a couple of idle, fat maggots, and that was all I could bear.

We’re hoping that most of the five dozen remaining eggs can be salvaged. In fact, we ate some of them this morning, even after the maggot debacle. I’m going to have to make quiches, souffles, eggs every morning. It seems almost more than I can face. In fact, right now, I’m putting off doing the dishes, the endless piles of dishes that never seem to go away. My second book could be called “Doing Dishes in Paradise.”