On Valentine’s Day, Scott and Amy flew to Staniel Cay to spend 5 days on the Fine Lion with us.  All I can say is WOW!  It was a blast.  We’ve not had any visitors yet so we forgot that when you’re on vacation, you pack into 5 days what we cruisers do in three weeks.  It was action packed…and lot of fun.

We went to Pig Beach at Big Majors the first afternoon.  Amy really wanted to see the swimming pigs…first hand.  Keep in mind once the pigs hear the dingy coming close to shore they start on there way towards the water, they are quite certain whoever is coming towards shore has treats for them.  We had scraps to feed them and true to form, they swam out towards the dinghy.  Who knew pigs could swim?  I (Kim) was definitely shocked to see them swimming for the dingy.  That’s when pandemonium broke out.  I yelled to Amy to watch out for the pigs coming to her, so Amy dropped the food bag.  Scott went to get the bag and one of the pigs started biting his bathing suit.  I just stayed out in the water…I am not a big fan of the pigs.  The male pig is dark brown and very aggressive, he came towards the boat when I (Kim) was in the dingy all I had was a blue sponge in my and hand and the pig must have been sure it was food because he brought his hooves towards the top of the dingy with his mouth wide open and went after the sponge.  Those teeth were huge.  Needless to say it startled me and I yelped, which I’m sure raised my blood pressure.  Hey, they like food…they’re pigs.

The next day we went to Black Point.  There Scott and Amy met Lorraine and had a great cracked Conch dinner.  We got some of her mother’s great home baked bread to go. On the way there, we stopped at Bitter Guana Cay to see some of the very large Iguanas.  They too, were hungry.  Scott got one of them to rise up on its hind legs for the lettuce.

On Saturday, we went outside into the Exuma Sound to do some deep water fishing.  No luck catching any fish.  Not because we did not try.  Scott has all kinds of fishing tricks it was just not a good day to fish…too calm.  We then went into Farmers Cut to anchor near Little Farmers Cay.  Scott definitely showed us up on the conch search.  On his first snorkel in the Bahamas, he got four nice conch.  We had a great day at Oven Rock that ended with a very fresh Conch Salad…provided by Scott…now known as “Conch Boy”.  It was interesting cleaning the conch for the salad.  The Bahamians can clean a conch in 3-4 minutes, it took Steve and me (mostly Steve) 15 minutes or so just to get the critter out of the shell, let alone get it cleaned and presentable enough to eat.  You will see via the pictures evidence of his success.

We spent a couple of lazy days going along the Bank side of Great Guana Cay.  Sailing and snorkeling in this beautiful water.  What’s not to like?  The weather was great and the sunsets were fantastic…just what Scott and Amy were looking for.

Our last night was spent at the Staniel Cay Yacht Club.  Scott and Amy actually ran into a friend of theirs from Annapolis that is a Captain on a large motor yacht that just happened to be in the “hood”.  It’s a small world folks. 

We were very sad to see Scott and Amy leave, but they had the ability to get a “taste” of the cruising lifestyle.  I think they liked it!  Scott loves the water and was in it constantly.  He was also fishing while we were moving.  Of course Kim likes Scott aboard as she gets a break since he grew up on sailboats. 

He also brought us a ton of fishing lures, baits, lines, down riggers, etc.  While that is great, I now don’t have an excuse for not catching fish.  He definitely “set me up”. 

We had lots of fun with the “30 somethings”.  We are resting up before we start back towards G-Town before the next adventure.  Kim wants flour tortillas and only in the Bahamas do you go 50 miles for tortillas.  Check out the pics of Scott and Amy’s visit.  We can’t wait to get them back here for a longer visit where we don’t have five different adventures per day…just two.

That’s all for now…;

Steve and Kim