Pittstown Point, Crooked Island, Bahamas

0 nm
Wind: E-SE 10-15 knots

Karl’s working away with power tools down in the basement, and I’m praying he doesn’t whack a finger or two off. I don’t think Crooked Island’s little clinic has exactly the resources necessary to reattach disattached fingers. I’m abandoning the boat yet again today. Nappy’s back in Nassau, so we have the house blessedly to ourselves and the sand flies.

I’ve been reading The Tin Drum, by Gunter Grass, another one of the requisite classics I’ve been dragging around with me. I bought it at one of those used-book library sales back in Oak Park, I think the year that Grass won the Nobel Prize for Literature. It’s a bizarre book. I was expecting a giant war tome about the perils of fascism, and instead it’s a comic tale of a three-year-old who decides not to grow up and spends the entire war banging on a toy drum while his parents engage in sexual escapades based on Rasputin. Karl, as usual, is casting me dirty looks as I engage in my literary pursuits while he does brute physical labor. Maybe next time I clean the toilet he’ll notice.

I’ve been trying to decide if Nappy still really needs us or if we’re just stealing Bahamian jobs by being here. We do still have to figure out all of our boat dilemmas, and while Nappy has dug up an extra fuel tank we can use to siphon our diesel, we still haven’t figured out what to siphon the diesel with. We’ve heard rumors of a fuel pump that the guy at the corner store has, but we might wait until Nappy gets back to engage in the subtle process of negotiation that using other people’s stuff entails. Then there’s still the sail problem. I’ve been researching in our encyclopedia of boat texts the fundamentals of sailmaking, and I’m quite sure I don’t have the resources necessary to sew any kind of sail, despite all my confidence to the contrary. I don’t even have scissors. That’s like a carpenter trying to build something without a saw. Not to mention that the sail I was going to try to make our storm sail out of is a 170, meaning that it’s completely the wrong kind of sailcloth. We may just have to limp to a boatyard with our engine and our staysail.

Still, I hope we’re helping Nappy more than we’re bringing him headaches. It’s been an amazing blessing for us to be able to be here, just to have access to laundry and showers and water and the freezer, and it’s going to be hard to wean ourselves a way from all those land-based luxuries. We are going to need to make a decision here soon, at least as to which way we’re heading. Back to the States, backwards, is still going to be a very hard decision for me to make. I want, with all my heart, more than I can admit to Karl, to keep heading south. If we have to lay up the boat here somewhere and wait, I don’t mind, but turning around? It would be hard blow for me emotionally. We’ll see. All we can do is wait and see.