In the Bahamas you should be prepared to do it yourself or go without. We have it good because regularly at home we try to solve our problems without buying something new or taking it for repairs. Boyd, in particular, hates to pay someone else for something he can do himself. He finds that many of the repair people you can get to come out to the house are not familiar with the type of product you expect them to service even if you called ahead to tell them the exact make and model of whatever you are calling about.

When our furnace died in the middle of the night on a Sunday night some winters ago he calmly got up went to the basement, popped off the front of the furnace and filed down the prongs (I think the are called igniters) then screwing the front back on the furnace he hit the restart button and the 15 year old furnace fired up as though it were new. Last year before we left the house the refrigerator, which was only 7 years old, started getting a thick coating of frost on the inside of the “frost free” freezer side.

No matter what I did it didn’t seem to matter. I adjusted the temperature, kept the freezer relatively free of unnecessary items and still it frosted over every 7-10 days. Once frosty it was impossible to keep anything appropriately cold in the freezer and I lost several partial gallons of ice cream to the problem. Left to my own devices I would have had to call a repairman or even worse purchase a new refrigerator. Boyd fixed it.

I think here in the Bahamas all of the experience working on our home, our rental units, and even more so our boat before we came has put us in a good position to be self reliant and it’s a good thing too!

The following is a true story and none of the names have been changed to protect the innocent. Paul has been somewhat resistant to fishing (well truth is he loves the fishing part and he even loves the eating the fish part, he can’t stand the part in between). Up until the last 3 days he has been something more than hesitant to go fishing knowing that if we catch it here I’m not playing, I’m cooking it! At home he just catches and releases in the Royal River.

Three days ago our friends on Taua put out a line and amazingly Peter caught an enormous Mahi (or dolphin fish). We weren’t able to weigh it but it was 49 inches long and when I lifted the carcass with the majority of the meat already removed it felt like about 30 lbs still.

We have eaten that as Taua shared generously for the last 3 nights. We had it sautéed in garlic, marinated in teriyaki and tonight I battered and fried some as well. It has been absolutely delicious and, I think, finally Paul is ready to fish.

Just a couple of problems were left to overcome. The first one was that we didn’t have the correct lures, so we bought some. The second one was that we didn’t have the correct line, so we bought some of that. The last one was getting the line that was on Paul’s reel off Paul’s reel and getting the new heavier line onto the reel. I think that this picture should explain it all.

Here Paul holds the line as Boyd winds it off the reel with an ingenious invention involving two paper plates, an empty coke can, a pencil, and the battery operated drill. Nicole helps by holding the pencil. See if you can figure out how we did this.