Recovering our FISHING MOJO and enjoying Long Island (Ep 54 - Monday Never Sailing)

New Island day, babe! Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, it's been a while. We've been here for... A month? Certainly more. Maybe six weeks? No. Five? I could be pushing five. But yeah, well, you told me we have to go somewhere, so... Where are we going? I think we're gonna go to Calabash Bay on the northwestern end of Long Island. So I'm entering a course into the chart plotter, referencing it against aqua maps, or explorer charts, and the Navionics sonar charts, just because these standard Navionics maps are pretty useless in the shallower bits of the Bahamas. It'll take us for like, what, 25 miles? Yeah, I think it's about 25. Maybe we'll catch a fish today. Yeah, there's a nice ridge that we can follow where it goes from... You know, thousands of feet up to the banks, and it's not really... It's basically on our path, so we can just follow that arc all the way up to Long Island. Hey girls, do you want to go sailing today? Yeah. Do you want to catch a fish today? Yeah? and once we got out into open water and over the ridge, we put out our fishing lines, and waited for a bite. Yeah. Can you see it? Open wide, buddy. Ah, fish on. There is literally nothing more exciting when sailing than to hear your reel go off. The thrill of knowing that you have finally caught a fish is, for me at least, like no other. Unfortunately, the realization that you've caught another barracuda isn't always the most exciting, but I'll still take catching a barracuda any day over not catching anything. All right, we have been in just a wretched fishing swamp. Every time we've been sailing, I've been trying. We've been in deep water. We've been on good ridges. I've tried all my different lures. I've tried all my tricks. I've even called friends who I know and trust to be like, what am I doing wrong? And just nothing, nothing, nothing. Already on the sail, I have now caught two barracudas. So Poseidon, come on. It's time. Please bring me back my fishing karma. We're about to arrive in Calabash Bay. The water is so beautiful. Easy motoring day. And yeah, excited to see a new and really, really beautiful, beautiful place. Our first night, we took a dinghy ride into the mangroves. We tried to follow a path that was going to take us on a full loop and spit us back into the anchorage, but we didn't get the timing of the tides quite right. All right, once we go, we're committed. I hope we can get through it because I don't want to go back through that tunnel the other way. Plenty of water. All right, let's see if we can make it another 50 yards before running aground again. Well, it was a pretty fun adventure while it lasted. The very top of the tide, I think we'd be able to make it all the way through. But we still got 18 inches to go. Just all these little, uh, little hummocks. That's what they're called? I don't know, maybe. Be a good place to canoe. Yep. Or paddleboard. So pretty and peaceful in here. Did my canoe come and inspire you? Uh, yeah, you are. It's like in a hole. So my, uh, deeper water comment proved to not be true, huh? Definitely not true. Pass it. The next few days we spent playing on the beaches while Will went spearfishing now that grouper season had finally opened. Season opener! Awesome, babe, great work! First Nassau of the year. Do you want to make it for dinner? Sure. Tacos? Okay. And how many souls and times that I've told the places that I'd want to be and how many days when I could have stayed instead of just getting up to leave and given we make time I'll meet you down the line From Calabash it was time to sail down to Thompson Bay where we were going to provision before meeting up with our friends in the Ragged Islands. Little did we expect that our first stop in Thompson Bay would have a local street fair and an attraction that would make Maddie happier than we'd seen her in our entire cruising season. So I think Maddie just hit the jackpot because we were looking for a place to pull up the dinghy and we happened to get out at maybe the only bouncy castle in the Bahamas. She's never seen a bouncy castle before. She bee-lied for it. She knew what was up. Oh yeah, she identified the fun potential. Bouncy castle fun maximized. It was time to enjoy a nice meal out as a family and then beg the owners to let us use their dog cleaning station to hose off our two-year-old. In the next episode we go through the scariest medical emergency we faced in all of our years traveling and sailing. Uh, Jeff got bit by a shark.