Little San Salvador

Little San Salvador is one of several islands owned or leased by cruise lines. We passed three of them this year. On these lands, the crusise line companies build fake Bahamian villages, gazebos, giant themed restauants, climbing areas, and hundreds and hundreds of umbrellas and beach chairs. Water toys: paddle boats, kyaks, banana boats, sailboats, motor boats fill the anchorages.  We anchored in the cove at Little San Salvador, the only boat there, we were protected from the 15 knot winds, but only partially protected from the surge of the waves rounding the edge of the bay and into the cove. It was another bumpy night. The Bahamian out islands are open to weather and seas. You don't want to go there if the winds are howling and the ocean roaring.  In the morning we left early, scooting out just as an enrmous top heavy cruise ship anchored outside the bay, ready to drop off the 4000 passengers to play on a tropic paradise. They think they have been to the Bahamas, but they have really been to Disneyland.

Conception Island and Cat Island

Leaving Long Island behind, we motored, as we have been doing 95% of our trip this year, to Conception Island, part of the National Park system Conception is a beautiful uninhabited island with coral reefs, white sand beaches and an interesting tidal river. Here we discovered why the breaker to the anchor windless had been shutting down the system. After letting out 85 feet of chain, the windless motor died. Rick spent over an hour diagnosing the malfunction, hoping for a different problem, one we could actually solve. No luck. The shoreline called to us, so we walked the sands and climbed the rocks, through the tanga-tanga (a composite of almost impassable mangrove, ligum vitae, and various other native plants) to see a full view of the island.
Through a cloudy western sky, with oranges and reds on the horizon, we toasted the setting sun with wine and a conch shell greeting.

The conch shell calling must have worked because the day dawned with sunshine. Rick hauled aboard the 85 feet of chain, using a pelican hook tied to a cleat to rest between pulls. With 10 knot north easterly winds, we set sail for Cat Island.

There we find The Hermitage, a retirement home for Father Jerome, a remarkable man, an architect, turned Anglican priest/mule team driver/horse breeder/Catholic priest/monk. He built churches and a monastery throughout the Bahamas, lovely stone monuments to God.  Amazingly, Father Jerome built The Hermitage, his retirement home, in 1937 and lived in it until his death 17 years later. He had all he needed here, a living area with a single stone chair, a bedroom cell, a kitchen with a table for one, a washing area under a porch roof, a small chapel with a bell tower. He built a cistern, a garden wall, and climbing the last 50 feet of the 200 foot hill, he carved the stations of the cross into large stones.

There are also the ruins of a plantation estate from the 1700s.

Farming is done, Bahamian style on Cat Island. The tanga tanga foliage is cleared out by pruning back to the thick woody stems. One would think nothing could grow in the rocky rubble that is left, but at the base of the cut back bushes and plants, where the soil is held together by the old root systems, seeds are planted. We saw corn, squash, bean vines, banana trees, and mangoes growing in a field of stones and encompassing several acres, a tough way to farm.

The Long Island Regatta

A highlight of the trip, the Long Island Regatta, our Bahamian adventure. Long Island gave us the opportunity to feel a part of the real community. The boats are all hand built of wood with sails of canvas. We were fortunate to be able to talk with Mr. Laurian Knowles, who, with his sons, built many of the beautiful wooden boats. There were four classes of boats, the largest 28 feet with about 900 feet of square canvas and a huge wooden boom almost twice the length of the boat. The race starts with sails down and all boats in a line. Each crew of 8 struggles to raise the sails and find the wind. Boats from islands all around the Bahamas send their best crews to race in the various regattas. Some arrive on a barge, some towed by power boats. We talked with the crews of several, including the 1st day's winners of the A and C class, both boats made by Mr. Knowles.

The four of us hung out at the Long Island Breeze Resort, a lovely hotel operated by two Americans and an Englishman, wonderful people. The hotel is the cruisers headquarters and they let us use their wifi and electricity for free and also the laundry for $2.00 a load, a bargain.

The races were great fun to watch, despite the exceptionally light wind the first day. We picked our favorites, cheering good tactics and criticizing errors in judgement.

The Regatta is also a homecoming for Long Islanders, from all over the Bahamas. It is billed as "A Bahamian Ting", and crowds waterside sell food and drinks, straw hats, and T-shirts.  There are Rake and Scrape bands, singes, prayers, and honors to be given. Sand Castle left for home after the first day, we will miss them.

The second day of racing, Rick and I returned to shore at night to participate in a real Bahamian event. Island music , called Rake and Scrape, was, in this case,  created by guitars, drums, tambourines, accordion, and saw and file. The beat is bouncy and watching the band and dancers joyous celebration brought us joy too. A dignified older man with skin the color of  creamed coffee, danced with an over-weight, grey-haired lady with the manner of a school teacher. Next to them, a skinny little guy in droopy clothes, sporting a Fu Manchu mustache, and a straw hat with a down-turned brim danced happily with  a plump, sweet-faced lady.  And there too, an older lady, one of the ugliest I've seen, danced. She had a forehead so high she appeared to be balding and her cheeks caved in as if there were molars missing. She wore a tank top and had a killer body and made all the right moves with a younger man, giving him a come hither stare as she danced to the beat.  Just behind them, a man with dazed eyes danced alone holding two beers, stopping to lean against a post for support between songs. A nicely dressed man in a straw cowboy hat swung his toddler son to the beat.  In the crowd. dozens of children raced past, some with parents coming fast behind them, arms out-stretched to catch the escapees.  Good times and big smiles all around. Truly a wonderful Bahamian day.



Long Island, I love you

Long Island challenges you. It is not for the faint of heart. If you are a timid tourist who likes it easy, forget Long Island. This is a place that dares you to discover it. Tourism here requires problem solving. It requires persistence. It requires a total lack of common sense.  We rented a car and took off to discover all the sites mentioned in the cruise  guide book. How hard could it be? There is only one main road down the length of the island, and the island is only a few miles wide. The first one was easy, Santa Maria Church, built by the Spanish and later converted to an Anglican church by the English, stands on the main highway, a splendidly intact structure, falling into genteel ruin.

Next came the plantation ruins at Grays...hmm, we seemed to have missed that. Then the caves at Hamilton....How the heck did we miss those?   We did find the museum at Buckley (though it was disguised as the public library) and got specific directions to the two plantation ruins we hoped to visit. After the museum, we successfully located Deans Blue Hole, in Turtle Cove, a lovely beach with shallow water circling the world's deepest blue hole, a 600 foot deep watery drop off connecting to the Atlantic Ocean.

Interesting and beautiful.

On to Clarencetown where Father Jerome, an Anglican architect turned Catholic Priest, built two stunning churches, the first, Anglican St. Pauls, the second, a Catholic church.

Both had been damaged by a hurricane last year, the Catholic church lost the cross atop one spire, and the Anglican church lost its roof. A cherub, victim of the storm lay in the grass nearby, its head and body separate.

We turned north again, deciding to bypass the caves. We followed the directions to the ruins of the plantation at Grays. Down a paved road to a dead end, right turn up a cliff on a rocky trail made for an off-road vehicle, we drove our rental car to the top, hiked through weeds and prickly plants into the bushes. There we viewed a single stone structure comprised of two end walls with chimneys and lots of stone rubble.  Bushes, neck high and thorny, prevented further examination.  Back to the car, down the hilly, rock filled path, and back to Queens Highway, the pot hole filled black top that serves as the main island road from tip to tip.  We headed north, looking for the highly recommended Blue Chip restaurant. 

And, we found it. Lots of Bahamian natives sitting outside on picnic tables playing scrabble; inside, a half dozen men sitting at the bar, not drinking, just chatting. In an adjacent room, two raggedy men sit staring vacantly at a TV set. 

"What do you want?" The proprietor asks.

"Lunch," we say.

"I don't have much," he replies. "I guess I could fix you some conch or maybe some chicken."

This is not sounding good. What kind of restaurant is this? So we settled for two cracked conch and two orders of chicken. We could see him behind the bar, pounding the conch, which is naturally tough, into submission.  A woman came in, she brought her own food in a styrofoam container and her own coke, but she sat at the counter and talked to the owner. This is definitely not looking good.  Another woman came in. "Have you got a menu? She asks. "No, I've got chicken and conch." Yep. We knew that. 

He brought us heaping plates of fried chicken and lightly battered conch and delicious fries. The meal was wonderful and we later found out that Mario, the owner/cook was renowned on the island for feeding the poor and the hungry. That's Mario standing in the left of the picture, one of the world's good guys.

Well fed, we went in search of the Adderly Plantation ruins. "Look for the signs on the main road in Stella Maris", they told us at the museum. We thought we were following the directions, but there is a Stella Maris town, a Stella Maris marina, and a Stella Maris resort. After searching for an hour, we gave up and went to seek the monument to Columbus at Cape Santa Maria. Look for the sign off the highway everyone said. Our first effort brought us to a sudden dead end at a tiny bay at the edge of the island. Try again, no sign here, but it is going in the right direction. Hmm, over a bone rattling dirt road to dead end at a really nice resort. Turn at the sign for the monument on the main road they said. Our third try was another dusty tire track path that seemed to go in the right direction, but no sign. A mile or so along, the road became so rocky and rutted that we feared bottoming out the rental car and left it sitting in the center of the road while we continued on foot around several more bends in the road.

After what seemed another half mile around several bends in the road, we spotted, maybe a mile in the distance, the MONUMENT. We all agreed that yes, we had seen the monument, and returned to the car, only to discover that we were missing a hubcap!

We retraced our path along the road, looking everywhere and then retraced our route along the road to the Cape Maria  Resort. Doom and gloom. It looked as if we'd bought ourselves a hubcap. But, bumping along on the road to Cape Maria Resort, Luke spied the hubcap, which had spun off into the bushes. Jubilation! We're happy again. That hubcap could have been anywhere on 70 miles of potholed, rock filled roads. How lucky were we to spot it!  We were so inspired that we set off to find the Adderly Plantation. This time, Jan spotted the sign and we embarked on another rock filled, dusty path, which ended at the beach. No signs here, but our directions from the museum were to walk toward the beach from the end of the road and follow the bushes north along the beach until we found a path.  Eventually a path appeared on the shore, heading toward a hill. We could see two chimneys rising above the trees. Now this was a ruin worth seeing. Maybe 7 buildings, crumbling stone houses, ramps to barns, storage, stone walls, a cistern, all part of a complex 2500 acre plantation dating from the 1700s. Except for the whine of mosquitos, the visit was perfect.



Ten hours of touring, bumping and searching, hiking, brambles, bugs, signless attractions, a hubcap, lost and found, and locating and visiting 6 of the 8 places on our list. We returned successfully to the boats.  Woke up the next morning to discover thieves had robbed the Scotia bank, just down the road, and they'd shot up the interior. They tried to make an escape by boat, but the Long Island Police were on the job and they were caught. Long Island may be far away out in the Atlantic, but life is never dull. Next post, the Long Island Regatta.

The Center of the World

On Long Island in the Bahamas, we discovered how truely international our world has become. We hiked across the island from our Salt Pond anchorage to see the Atlantic beach. Storms and ocean currents passing by have made this beach a repository of the world's garbage. Dotting the beaches were thousands of pounds of trash. In just minutes we located a vacuum sealed coffee packet called, in English, "Slimming Coffee", with a picture of a sexy, slender lady, and directions and information in an asian script. There were water purifiers written in Spanish, body mosturizing lotion in French, and a plastic container sporting a picture of a smiling African family, and writting which  seemed to have French, African, English infuence and appeared to give directions to protect a family (famnia)  from cholera (kolera) by mixing with 5 gallons of water.

Shoes, no two alike and very few intact, mingled with pieces of laundry baskets, fishing net, broken styrofoam floats, and bottles. I never realized how many people are walking around the world with a single flip flop, the other having dropped off their boat or washed away with the tide 10,000 miles away. Some where , far away, a child cried out and pointed to the ocean as his whiffle ball floated away in the ocean. It is here, we have seen it, and seen also the myriad of unidentifiable plastic pieces, parts of containers of one sort or another, a necessity once, but then discarded, either thoughtlessly or by accident into that vast ocean, the Atlantic, and deposited as flotsam and jetsam on the isolated beaches of the outlying islands of the tropics, thousands of miles away.

Georgetown

We'd always wondered about Georgetown. So many cruisers plant themselves there for the winter. We spent 10 days there, or at least Rick did while Cookie went off galavanting to the states for her brother's wedding. We anchored in the protected waters between the barrier island, Stocking Island , and Georgetown on Great Exuma. Our first day was sun and fun as we toured the town and had lunch at the Peace and Plenty, a nice hotel, originally built  by the grandson of Henry Flagler, who built the overseas RR to Key West, and opened Florida to tourism. Nice atmosphere and pretty view. Georgetown weather wasn't kind to us. The wind blew at 20 knots, raising bumpy water that interfered with sleep, and lightening storms that did the same. The skies were cloud filled and wind filled for 8 straight days, except when they were cloud filled and windless. On the 10th day, we awoke to occasional sunshine and after a brief shower at noon, we fueled at the pier and crossed to the Stocking Island anchorage opposite the Chat and Chill, a friendly tiki bar on a beautiful swimming beach. We departed on a dinghy tour and discovered a hurricane hole with a ghost town of boats abandonned for the season, tucked inside a tiny salt water bay, sails removed, dingys tied down, companionways locked. Around the bend was a path to the beach, which, after a climb up a hill, proved to be spectacular!

So we were finally able to discover the attraction of Georgetown for so many fellow cruisers.

Little Farmers Cay

Not quite sure why the call it Little Farmers Cay. There seemed to be no farming at all and very little employment. We did find a patch of wild cotton, however.

The town looked dusty and slow, the inhabitants were mostly descended from a former slave woman, who bought the island. The residents were all very proud of owning their own island. Between 50 and 70 people live there now, scrammbling to find work and idling the hours away. They aren't happy about the lack of work, but are  "happy to be living in the most beautiful place in the world."

We tried to reward those we could, buying produce and a carved African influenced tiki from the local wood carver, a man of medium talents, but great salesmanship and charm. The best job in town seemed to be held by the local policewoman, who drove past us at least 3 times within an hour, to ask, "Any problems?"  We  felt sure she was hopeful that we had a difficulty which might require her help.  Another interesting character was a lanky man, with a big smile, Mr. Brown, who we decided was a long lost cousin. He towered above us and chatted about the beauty of life in the Bahamas.

We anchored in Little Farmers Cay, just past the airfield in 7 feet of water and left early the following day on our way to Georgetown.

Revisiting the Exumas

From West BAy, in New Providence, we took the long, but coral head free route across the White Bank to Shroud Key. The Exumas are a favorite, with rocky ocean cliffs on one side, and on the other, shallow aqua waters and lush vegetation on the bank side. We grabbed one of the Exuma Park mooring balls at Shroud Cay. What a beautiful spot! Luke and Jan, with their more seaworthy dinghy motored us up the pale blue tidal creek that splits the island. On the other side, we hiked up a cliff to see where drug agents spied on drug runners on the next island in the 80s, and we walked the pretty beaches there.

On our return to the boats, we discovered trhat a sudden wind had whipped the waters of the sound into two to three foot waves!  Dismounting from the rocking dinghy to the pitching, bucking boat was tricky business, even trickier for Luke and Jan, who fought to hoist their dinghy and motoe aboard behind them. Within an hour, the waters calmed as suddenly as they had boiled.

Cambridge Cay, another favorite Park stop was equally lovely. We arrived early and took our dingies over to two dive spots. The first was the Sea Aquairum, opposite Little Halls Pond Cay, teeming with brilliant fish just out of reach. The second site was in deeper water, not far away, thst of a single engine plane which had crashed many years ago and still stands, eerily empty, at an angle, nose down into the sand.  The cockpit door is missing. The plane a dark greeny color in the green water, a little creepy to see. I half expected a dead pilot slumped over the controls. The day was concluded with another spectacular Bahamian sunset.

Staniel Cay and Big Major. This is what we like, beautiful scenery, fun adventures. Last year, we missed the hike to the gorgeous Atlantic beaches on Staniel Cay where the James Bond movie, Thunderball, was partially filmed.  A club of the same name opened, but closes last year. We hiked up to see it. We found a souvenir along the way in the form of advertizing on the door of a pickup. The view from the top, with the Thunderball cave island in the background was worth the climb to the top.

Another Bahamian Adventure Begins: Getting There

 Another year of the winds coming from the wrong direction. On Thursday, May 4th, northerly windws were still blowing, but predicted to be down to about 7-9 by Saturday, so our threesome of buddy boats, Wind Dancer, Sand Castle, and Serendipity,  slogged through jerky seas and anchored in the shelter of Boot Key. Paul and Kitty on Serendipity chose to enter Marathon and grab a mooring ball. They discovered a fuel line leak which would delay them for 4 days.....and then there were two.

Sand Castle and Wind Dancer entered Bimini otwo days later, motoring all the way in light winds. The channel was much closer to the shore than we remembered, going down to just 7 feet. Bimini is a funny place, lots of marinas, but no one monitoring the radio. We called all the places we were familiar with from last year, but no answer. Brown's marina, however, had people on the docks shouting as we passed, "$1.50 a foot! Those other people aren't listening. Come see us" We were pleasantly surprised to find new rub rails on the slips and newly repaired docks. The bathrooms were poor, but the staff was enthusiastic and there was free wifi.

We opted for dinner at The Big Game Club and weren't disappointed with fantastic calamari, burgers, and Bimini's full moon rising before us.

Nature put on a show for us the following evening as we anchored on the banks in glassy waters with dusk fading the blue of the sky into the blue of the sea.

On to the Berry Islands, motoring still, we spent a second year at the Berry Islands Club mooring. We had enterd Chub Key, just around the corner to refuel first.  Berry Islands Club doesn't answer their radio either, sailors are expected to dinghy in an dpay at the bar, which we did.

On to West Bay on New Providence Island, a beautiful anchorage with a nice public beach ashore and high end estates lining two thirds of the shore.