currently in:  Big Major's Spot (Staniel Cay), Exumas, Bahamas

Staniel Cay isn't exactly a big city - in fact, there are probably fewer than 200 residents - but compared to all the uninhabited and barely-inhabited islands we've been to, it's a metropolis. So we've been taking advantage of the town's services: we've dumped our garbage, bought a few fresh vegetables (the mailboat arrived this morning, fortunately - I expect that they'll be down to a few scrubby potatoes by tomorrow afternoon), and left off our laundry to be done by one of the local women. And best of all, we got an internet connect!

Much to our astonishment (and delight), the Staniel Cay Yacht Club has wireless internet. This leads to the rather amusing sight of yachties scattered around the bar, drinking beer and busily typing away on their laptops. We uploaded a bunch of photos and made a few small updates to our website.

First, the photos. These are all a bit larger and higher resolution than usual, since they didn't have to go through our usual agonizingly-slow method of connection, but none are larger than 80K:

• Two barracuda and a yellowtail snapper
• Gray snappers hanging out among the soft coral
• A Queen Triggerfish on the reef - nice eyeliner!
• A Red Hind (a type of grouper) wants to know what the heck is going on with this camera thingy pointed at him (this one is my favorite)
• Diving out of the cave at the Rocky Dundas
• Queen Conch striking an artsy pose on an underwater sand dune
• "Boo Boo Hill", where cruisers leave carvings and paintings with their boat names, at Warderick Wells
• Hanging out by the crystalline waters of a Shroud Cay lagoon
• Ilana, Bernadette, and Douglas on a Shroud Cay beach
• This is what a good anchor set in Bahamas sand looks like

(If I made an error in any of the URLs, you should be able to find all the photos here.)

For those of you interested in the technical details:  our new camera is a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P150 digital camera, with an underwater housing ("Marine Pack") for taking all these nifty snorkeling shots. At 7.2 megapixels the pictures are huge and much higher resolution than we can reasonably put out on the web, so we crop and shrink them, but we are hanging on to our favorite shots in high resolution just in case we manage to interest anyone in publishing them.

Second, while rummaging through my computer I found a little file I'd written some time ago and never uploaded: The Sailing Cheat Sheet. This may help my landlubber friends, and anyone else reading this log who is completely at sea, as it were, about sailing terms. It's linked from our Articles and Links page, to which we've also added a link to Ithaka's website. If you've only looked at our log entries and never poked around the rest of our site (linked from the nifty menu at the side), please look around!