Letter from Long Island...

Saturday morning we found the Farmers' Market.  It was pretty low key with only three people bringing items to sell.  We bought a couple stalks of sugar cane - not overly sweet, and not as juicy as we thought.  We also bought a couple of plantains.  Sue doesn't think they are ripe yet so I'm not sure what we'll do with them.  The most interesting thing we found was a stalk of bananas.  The whole stalk the lady brought was maybe 2 feet long.  The bananas are about 3 inches long so they remind me of baby carrots as opposed to real, full sized carrots. About a third of the bananas were ripe, and 2 or 3 people ahead of bought them.  The seller said that the green ones would ripen in a day or so, and indeed they have.  We have to eat 3 or 4 to make one "normal" one, so the 20 or so we bought only amount to  4 or 5  bananas back home. It was pretty neat watching them go from grass green and bitter to golden yellow and sweet.

We had heard that Monty and Sara Lewis were in Long Island, and Saturday we saw their boat.  They publish the Explorer Charts for the Bahamas. These are the gold standard charts for the area and I'm guessing 85 to 90% of the boats have 2 or 3 of their chartbooks on board.  At $60 a piece (current edition price) and 3 chartbooks needed to cover the Bahamas, I thought their boat was quite modest.

Sunday and today it has been quite windy.  Not wanting to get a salt water soaking going ashore we've stayed on the boat.  Sue spent most of the day ordering a couple more balls of yarn so she can finish the sweater she's been workking on since July.  Doing on-line things with the Kindle can take forever and try the patience of a saint -that's why I love it so...

I'm reading a book a day the last few days, so we need to get to a book exchange pretty soon.  We also would like to rent a car for a day to see a bit more of the island.  We're hoping to find another couple to split the cost, but that might not happen.