4/2/16
Spanish Wells, Eleuthera, Bahamas
Posted by Bill

Happy April! We have been enjoying Spanish Wells. The town is well kept, no trash, buildings well maintained, and the people are really nice. The day after we arrived, we went ashore to do laundry. If you stay at the marina in town, you can use their new laundry facilities, but since we are on a mooring ball, we had to use the only other option…the laundry mat here…one washer, one dryer in a shed behind one of the small grocery stores (CW Grocery). We paid $6/token, which does a load of wash or a dryer load. For $24 we completed 2 loads. We hauled our cloths from the dinghy about 3 blocks to the machines and then back again.

We have been checking out the local dining options, most of which are very pricey. We seem to keep going back to Buddah’s, as it is the most reasonable and the food is very good. Buddah also has a liquor store, and we restocked some vodka as our supply was dwindling dangerously low. Mrs. Buddah gave us a ride back to our dinghy so we didn’t have to carry the bottles…very nice. Here are some more pictures of what the houses look like:

One of our goals at this stop was to go over to Harbour Island. It is on the Atlantic Ocean side of Eleuthera, and is known for it’s pink sand beaches and luxurious resorts. We hired a guy from Pinders Grocery store to take us via boat to the west side of North Eluethera, then via land taxi to the dock where the other water taxis go over to Harbour Island. Then we took one of those water taxis and spent the day. It was really nice there. The beach was beautiful!! We did a mini pub crawl across the island, stopping at a restaurant on the beach called Sip Sip (the locals slang for gossip). It was expensive, but the food and view were outstanding. This is certainly the land of the rich and famous. All of the places to eat or drink were very expensive, and the rooms at the resorts are in the $400+ range per night. We enjoyed the day very much and would absolutely recommend going there. Our favorite bar was at the Remora Bay resort and marina. They have a frozen custom version of Goombay Smash that was the bomb!! Bring lots of cash though!
The princesses at another Princess St:

Random street shots:





A not so good picture of us at the “Lone Tree”, a local tourist photo spot:

Beach pics and an example of the resorts: 2205 6 12



Since most of the traffic was golf carts, we weren’t surprised to see this:

Sip Sip:

We were planning to leave today to stage at Egg Island, then sailing to the Abacos on Sunday, but our weather window slammed shut. 6-8 foot seas today and winds cracking up from the north (where we are heading) tomorrow. It looks like we will not be able to get out of here for a week or so, but we like it here a lot and we have good protection from the weather. This certainly has been a bad winter to try and travel around the islands. The winds and seas are very uncomfortable more than 80% of the time. We seem to have a couple of days between these bad periods, where we try to get to the next place and prepare to get slammed again. Except for here, it has made it hard to check out and explore the places we are staying.