The Dooleys took a picture of us as we were anchored off of Mermaid Reef just outside of Marsh Harbor.

    HOME AGAIN, but I thought I'd do a brief wrap-up.  Thursday was blustery----big surprise!  We had to vacate the boat by 10 am. We had bags packed, linens gathered for the staff, extra food stuffs arranged for easy pick-up by 8:30.  Dan decided to email Ed and Connie to let them know we had to leave the boat by 10, that we had food left over and they were welcome to any of it.  ....WELL, we have two emails "labelled" Ed, and Dan picked the wrong one.   Instead of writing Ed and Connie, he wrote to our next door neighbors back in Spring Grove, Ed and Karen Smith.  Ed (Smith) responded with  a slightly confused tone that he and Karen had to work today and probably couldn't get over this morning---were we going away for a while??  We didn't realize the erroneous addressee until we got home Thursday night. We all had a good laugh about it.

Dan, in street clothes shifting bags ashore (again taken by Dooleys)

      Ed and Connie showed up at our dock at 10:00 while we in the middle of our debriefing by one of the Moorings staff.  As soon as the debriefing was over, they came aboard and did find a few things they felt were worth retrieving.  After all the luggage was off the boat, Ed and Connie joined us at Curly Tails for a departure Bloody Mary (thanks, Ed!).  As we chatted, they mentioned their friends who had departed the day before we arrived had the same  trouble getting through the Nassau airport with 2+ hours between flights and had the same return schedule we had...with only 1 hour and 10 minutes to make the change (including immigration and customs) in Nassau.  They chickened out and switched their Bahamas Air flight to 7:25am and had plenty of time in Nassau. ,,,a little late for us to do likewise, so we hoped for the best.
     Wouldn't you know it, the Bahamas Air flight to Nassau was late!  That cut our transfer time to less than 40 minutes.  But with the great help from both Bahamas Air and AirTran ground staff we made the transfer with 3 minutes to spare!!  They rushed us through check-in, immigration, customs and security like we were VIPs.  Easy flight home and luckily all the snow we had heard about on Wednesday was nonexistent by the time we arrived in BWI.  Our final thoughts---if you have to charted, the Moorings is the way to go, but having your own boat is WAY better.  Next year......  ~~~_/)~~~ M&D, K&P

To see all (and too many) of our pictures go to http://sailbrunelle.smugmug.com/Sailbrunelle-Blog-Photos/2013-Bahamas-Charter.