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Thursday, March 30th - Paradise Island, Bahamas
I take it all back
about Sampson Cay being a "developed location."
ZIA is currently tied up at the marina in
Atlantis,
the only sailboat amongst some seriously huge mega
yachts. Following the advise of our friend and
long-time cruiser, Johnny Martin, we called the marina a
couple of times to see if we might get a spot.
After speaking to Obi who firmly but pleasantly let us
know that it would be hopeless to expect to find a place
at the marina, Joe called back and spoke to Victoria.
"Obi told us it was looking good to find us a spot to
come in today. We are on our way and should be
there about 3:30pm." He assured her that we didn't
need electricity or water, just a place to get on and
off the boat. About three minutes later, she told
us there might be room in one of the 150ft slips that
only had a hundred footer in it at the moment.
They were expecting to leave the next morning at 7am,
but if we could fit and didn't mind waking up early to
let them out, we were in luck. Despite the hefty
price tag at six dollars a foot, we were thrilled.
Atlantis is like Disneyland with a water park theme.
There is a huge aquarium housing hundreds of thousands
of fish from giant manta rays to sharks to piranha to
moray eels and much, much more. There are a dozen
different water slides and rides, restaurants, shops and
even a Starbucks. Wow! We haven't seen so
much civilization since leaving the States in November.
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Our last port of call
was Compass Cay. It was just a few miles away from
Sampson Cay, but we had heard from a number of different
people about the "tame" nurse sharks there. You
can feed them, pet them, and even swim with them if you
are really brave. None of us felt the overwhelming
desire to get into the water with the ten or so sharks
that were swimming around the marina's dock, but we did
feed them a bunch of hot dogs and got to pet them; they
feel like sandpaper. Unfortunately, we had some
technical difficulties with our camera, so we lost our
photos and cannot share them with you. The girls
were so thrilled after their first trip in (I stayed
onboard to cook dinner) that we went back again for
lunch. There was supposed to be a restaurant
there, but in reality it was just a gas grill and a
fridge stocked with burgers and hot dogs.
Nonetheless, we signed up for a meal and bought some of
the hot dogs to feed to the pet sharks. We took a
walk over to the beautiful beach on the ocean side of
the island and just enjoyed the mellow pace of the
place. There must be hundreds, if not thousands of
similar islands in the Bahamas. It is really and
amazing area.
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Reality invaded our
life a little bit, forcing us to come to the big city in
search of a notary. We own a portion of a small
commercial building in Annapolis with a group of other
investors and we are refinancing. We had been
emailing legal documents back and forth and need to get
a signed copy FedExed back to the group so they can
close on the loan. It was just the excuse we
needed to come to Atlantis. We had been talking
about it beforehand, but I'm not sure we would have made
the decisive move without the added necessity of
business. The girls are loving it. They did
half a day of kid camp today and are looking forward to
trying out more of the water slides this afternoon.
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So, I'm off to explore this decadent place with them
while Joe is at the Embassy getting our legal
requirements resolved. I'll get some more photos
to post while I'm at it.
Love,
Christy, Joe, Cassie and Juliana
Next entry
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Many thanks to our
friend Craig Homenko for his assistance in setting up
the website.
We also would like
to thank our buddy Scott Brunner who has been kind
enough to host the website on his server.
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