Immigration Lets Us Stay!

March 14, 2013

 

On Tuesday, March 12 we traveled by rental car from Emerald Bay Marina to Georgetown Immigration.  Our previous approved stay was set to expire on 3/19.  We had tried to extend at the Immigration office in Long Island, but that office would not renew our stay until the day it expired or at earliest the day before.   Rather than wait in Long Island for almost 2 weeks we decided to return to the Georgetown office who had previously told us they would extend within 2 weeks of expiration.

 

Well the great news is that we got a 90 day extension to 6/20/2103, more than enough time for our plans.  Georgetown Immigration was very nice and processed the extension in about 15 minutes.  Below see our immigration papers.  Our original stay is at the bottom, and the extension is near the top.  Please note all hand-written dates are DD/MM/YY.

 

 

 

 Actually as we count the days, we may be ‘illegal’ on next Wednesday 3/20, but we will trust that Immigration did the date math to their satisfaction.

 

We also did some provisioning and other tasks on that day and got to spend some time with friends Rick and Susan of ‘Just Cause’.

 

We had hoped to leave Emerald Bay yesterday, but there was still a large ground swell, that made the channel very rough.  A ground swell has large widely spaced waves originating from a far away storm.  At its peak, these swells were 14 feet high with a 15 second period (that is long). Today the ground swell is way down, but last night a front came with fairly strong winds, so we are still trying to determine when we will leave. 

 

While we are here, however, we are making the ‘best of  the situation'. We have discovered a nice restaurant at the nearby Grand Isle Resort http://www.grandisleresort.com/ which is open to the public.  In December this resort was host to a photo shoot for the 2013 Sports Ilustrated swimsuit issue.  Yesterday, we also bought day passes to the resort which gave us access to their pool - no swimsuit models present as far as I could determine.  We do not often have such amenities;  the last time we swam in a pool was at Twin Dolphin Marina in Bradenton back in October.  It is nice to take advantage of marina/resort facilities once in a while.

 

 

Tom

Docked at Emerald Bay Marina

Great Exuma, Bahamas