Monday Jan 16, 2023 - Long Island (Day 1)

 Woke to the lovely smell of fresh brewed coffee. Capt Erick was on deck going over notes from previous visits to Long Island. Today Deb and I check into the AirBnB with a washing machine and a real sized shower. The boat is actually very comfortable, but after a week the laundry and trash had to be dealt with. They have a shower on the boat but since the sailing was so good yesterday, we never ran the engine so no hot water. First world problems...

We stacked all of our bags, trash, laundry, and all of us on the dinghy and motored to the tall dock, unloaded and walked the  ¼ mile to the AirBnB. It is owned by a retired Bahamian firefighter who now lives part-time in Florida, and it looks like he built 2 units. One to live in and one to rent. Our cottage has a beautiful view of the water and is really comfortably outfitted. We found the keys, washer, and dryer, and all rotated into the hot shower.

Next stop was lunch at Sou’ Side down the road and ordered conch sandwiches, a fish sandwich and cracked conch, along with a few beers from Vanessa. Another couple from Canada were just leaving and another guy with an old Nissan hippie van came in for a beer, but other than that we had the whole porch to ourselves.

After lunch we stopped at the grocery store for a few supplies. The prices here, as you can imagine, are astronomical since everything comes on a boat. But the store had a good selection. Then next door to the liquor store for some beer ($27 for a 6 pack).

There is a salt pond on the other side of the island which we walked to (the island is pretty skinny). Long Island, Ragged Islands and Iangua are the three islands with a long history of salt production. After the American Revolution a lot of English loyalists came to the islands. Slavery was still legal until 1840 or so so they used slave labor to grow cotton (did not last long, no soil here) and produce salt. They drew sea water in huge ponds and let it evaporate, kind of like a maple sugar pan with multiple sections. Then scrape the salt out, put it in bags and then put it on ships and sell. Slavery ended and this all went to pieces, but in the mid 1900's some big salt companies (Morton, Diamond and others) produced salt by the same process, but with diesel instead of slaves.

Erick & Hannah went back to Surprise to get laundry and later we got out the barbecue grill at the AirBnB and Erick made steak tacos for dinner. Chatted until they went back to Surprise and Deb and I tried to watch a movie (back to civilization) but fell asleep early. Kind of weird to have terra firma underfoot after 6 days on Surprise.