We left Great Harbour on a calm Friday (Dec. 6) morning and motored the 35 nm to Bond Cay. As I said in my previous post, we’ve spent some time here at Bond over the years so we’re quite familiar with this area. This time around we decided to get as close as possible to shore so we’re nicely tucked in at the south end of the cay.
It looks like we’ll be here for a few days due to the wind direction. We also don’t want to get down to Nassau too soon (a week or so before our flight is enough time on the dock). While we’re anchored at Bond, we decided to get some jobs done and the # 1 job was to get our new water maker running! When we bought the boat it came with an installed water maker. We used it for our first few seasons down here but when our generator died after our Covid hiatus, we got rid of that old water maker. It wasn’t working very well and needed the generator to operate. Lots of boats down here have a Rainman portable water maker and we’ve heard great reviews about these systems. It is easy to buy water in the Bahamas but now that we’re heading further south, it was time to invest in a new system. We went with a Rainman but got the “naked” version, which means it’s not portable.
The first part of the installation I’ve already talked about because it was done at Reynolds. This part of the installation required some ingenuity. Mark had to make some brackets and supports for all the levers and gauges that needed to be mounted with the compressor unit. Mark gathered all the necessary supplies, including our portable generator and we loaded it all into the dinghy so Mark could do the metal cutting and grinding on shore instead of on the boat. It took him a few hours but all the newly created brackets and supports worked perfectly. By 4 pm this afternoon (Dec. 8), we were making fresh water for the first time – very exciting!! It’s a bit noisy but the fact that we can make about 35 gallons of water in an hour is worth the noise!
So tomorrow Dec. 9th will bring another day anchored here at Bond. We have a few more jobs to pick away at. I started applying the semco to our exterior teak today so I’ll continue with that job. Mark will spend a bit of time working on the wiring to our wind instrument – it quit today so that needs a bit of attention. We’re watching the wind very closely because we’ve got a northern system moving in on Thursday that won’t subside until the beginning of next week. If possible we’d like to scoot down to Nassau this Thursday, just as the strong winds are starting. Time will tell!!
Crimson Kathryn and her crew 