Thursday, February 28, 2008
Marsh Harbor and Hope Town
Marsh Harbor
February 26, 2008
On Thursday, February 21st we left Green Turtle Cay for Marsh Harbor on Great Abaco Island to re-provision and to take in junior Junkanoo, a competition of what are called “gangs” from a town or school dressed in explosively bright costumes like mummers and participants in Carnival parades, very African, and very, very slow. It was to start at 6:30 and a two block, well-lit parade route was lined with Bahamians and tourists. Orotund speeches were given by local dignitaries, nothing happened. Officious looking judges with clip boards would walk back and forth, nothing happened. Then about 7:30 a group of darling five year olds went by. A couple of school buses arrived with kids in costumes, one from Fox Town where we had dropped off Roland. Nothing happened. Forty five minutes passed and another group went by. I went to check out food vendors and other sites, came back, and had missed nothing.
It was cool, we hadn’t had supper, and at 9:30 we decided to leave. Went to our dinghy and back to the boat anchored well out in the huge anchorage of Marsh Harbor, ate and went to bed to stir at three a.m. and hear the beat of drums coming from town. This was a junior competition. The real Junkanoo occurs on Boxing Day, December 26th and New Years Day with the biggest festival in Nassau. There are mixed accounts of its origins, but it seems to have originated in Ghana and came to North America with slavery. The instruments are goat skinned drums, cow bells, whistles, bones and rattles.
The Whale
Getting to Marsh Harbor on Great Abaco Island from Green Turtle Cay required us to go on the ocean side of Whale Cay, a passage notorious for big, irregular seas. Cruisers call it “The Whale.” It’s a treacherous passage because of its location at the edge of Little Bahama Bank, this great limestone submerged mesa that rises above the deep ocean floor that is covered by one to fifteen feet of water over virtually its entire expanse. Two big islands, Grand Bahama and Great Abaco are the largest land masses that protrude above the underwater mesa.
Our present cruising ground is the Sea of Abaco, a relatively sheltered body of water protected from the west by Great Abaco Island that is shaped like a bent leg with the thigh running from northwest to southeast, the knee at the location of Marsh Harbor, and the shin bone running due south. The Cays (pronounced “keys” but my brain keeps making me say “kays”) are much smaller islands that roughly parallel the coast of Great Abaco Island four to five miles to the east at the edge of the Bank. Most Cays are protected from the Atlantic by reefs a mile or so offshore, where brilliant white crests of waves break in contrast to the cobalt blue deep sea beyond. The cays shorelines vary from treacherous, jagged limestone to glorious fine-sand beaches. It is a spectacular landscape.
Poor old, uninhabited Whale Cay has two unfortunate characteristics. To its west, for the three or four miles between it and Great Abaco Island, lie Whale Cay sand shoals only passable by small boats, so we can’t sneak behind it in its lee to travel from Green Turtle Cay to Marsh Harbor. To the east of the Whale the water is deep, 36 feet or so, but there is a gap in the off-shore reef leaving the Cay fully exposed to the seas and swells of the Atlantic and a channel for the tide to rip. Four miles away the sea floor plummets to 900 feet.
The nearness of the Bank’s shelf, tides and seas can create a sea called hereabouts a rage, irregular steep, breaking. Boats are often stuck north or south of the Whale for days awaiting the right conditions. The one and one-half mile long Whale lies exposed to the northeast. We opted for a day when winds were forecasted 10 to 15 from the southeast and to make the passage along its face at about high tide. As usual, forecasts of 10 to 15 translate to 15 to 20, seas were capped and breaking, about three to four feet, lumpy and irregular mix of swells and waves, but readily passable with the jib out and motor on.
The distance to come through the gap between the barrier reef and the northwest end of the Whale to going back through the gap at the Southeast end is only about four miles, but it took a full hour with Journey stalled by plunging into steep seas in what could be considered moderate conditions. Traversing this passage in strong blows from anywhere north to east with current going out could be horrific.
There’s a warning in the Gulf Stream and Whale passages. Don’t be fooled by warm, crystal clear air and water. They lure you like the witch’s ginger bread and gumdrops cabin and you will be eaten alive.
Marsh Harbor is a market town, a version of any rural community that has the only shopping for miles around: dusty, busy, offering a few more choices. We were on a mission to solve our technical disconnectedness. The Bahamas Telephone Office clerk took a look at our new, first class, multi-function Verizon telephones and said “these are the wrong kind of phones to work here.” Further more, she added, “Verizon keeps telling people they have a roaming agreement with us and they don’t.” She had phones, for hundreds of dollars, but suggested we go to one of three shops that sell cheaper phones in which you can insert a chip and code in pre-paid minutes. She recommended one particular store, turns out that it was run by a sister of one of BaTelCo’s employees.
We found an LG phone, same brand as ours, that will use the same 12 volt charger. It’s a tiny thing of unknown vintage and origin with few functions. She put the chip in it to activate it, loaded the pre-purchased usage minutes, and we then looked at the written instructions which were printed in every language but English. The clerk was apologetic, said we could return the phone, but not the $60 of minutes. We’ve figured it out enough and can at least reach and be reached quickly should the need arise. Verizon has agreed to suspend and not charge us for our service, so it works out to a wash.
We also called on Out Island Internet Services and met with a pallid American (remember this is the sun filled Bahamas) who should have had a plastic pocket protector, very intense and very techy. His sales pitch went something like; none of the wifi antennas are any good but we have an antenna and bridge box for $235 that runs off of AC only that converts to 12 volts but don’t plug it into your battery directly because that will fry it, that comes with software that is too technical for you to use so we found easier software that we sell for $50 but its from Brazil and all but the one screen you need is in Portuguese, but we never need to look at the other screens, and this should allow you to get our wifi signal from your boat around the Sea of Abaco for a coast $120 a month to subscribe but no guarantees and no returns. We decided to pass.
Maxwell’s Super Market was big and well stocked and now we are re-stocked, carried the stuff three blocks to the dinghy dock to be greeted by a guy, clearly on something, who “helped” by untying the dinghy, wouldn’t let go and asked for a dollar like the squeegee guys who used to clean your windshields at intersections in New York whether you asked them to or not. It makes one feel a bit insecure, but so far no one locks boats or dinghies and we’re assured security is not a problem. Bahamas squeegee man is not found in any of the cruising guides.
Did laundry at the Marsh Harbor Marina and ran into Pat and Gary who Roland, M. and I had gone to greet at Sale Cay when we saw their hailing port was Salina, KS. Roland’s family was from Salina. They, like us, were signing up for a steak night at the Marina’s Jib Room restaurant, were anchored not far from us, so we went together. Gary ran for more than 30 years a service agency in Salina for disabled people and Pat was a special education teacher. They retired to the Seattle area on an Island near Olympia, where daughter and granddaughter live, have a trawler there, and keep their beautifully restored 1966 Pearson 42 in Fort Lauderdale for cruising the Bahamas in the winter. We ended up back on their boat for a night cap after truly terrific strip steaks and – heaven forbid – stayed up until midnight for the first time of the entire trip!
Overboard Drill
We have four reusable orange juice-size cups that we found are the right height to hold open the v-berth hatch just a little bit when it’s too breezy to be opened wide. When removing said cup by reaching up from below it slipped from my hand, clicked across the deck and silence. A later survey of the deck revealed the cup lost at sea, making the Admiral none to happy, envisioning two sharing one orange juice cup. Coming back from Marsh Harbor Marina six hours later, the dinghy laden with laundry, the Admiral yells stop, and there half submerged, about a mile from our boat at anchor, bobbed the errant yellow cup. Pulled to safety and resuscitated we toast its health and ours with juice.
February 27, 2008
Hope Town
Anchor up on February 24 to leave Marsh Harbor for Hope Town on Elbow Cay only about 8 miles away. Motored half the way and sailed the rest in time to make the entrance to the harbor near high tide. There’s only 5 feet at low at some points and we draw five-and-a-half feet. We’ve become inured to one, two or three feet under the keel. The terror is partly diminished because the bottom is fairly even; shallow stays shallow for long stretches, not rapidly shallower.
Hope Town, like New Plymouth, captures you. We’ve been moored here for four days and have no definite plans to leave.
You enter Hope Town Harbor through a 100 foot wide s-shaped channel into a pool hidden from the sea, roughly a half mile square in area walled by low, vegetation covered dunes and a shoreline of three funky marinas on the western shore and Hopetown’s wood frame, pastel houses and stores cheek to jowl near the harbor entrance on the northeastern side. At night the shore is dotted with low-wattage, incandescent lights, while the five pulses of a yellow beam arc over your head from the kerosene mantle shining through the rotating Fresnel lens of Hope Town’s lighthouse. It was built by the British Imperial Lighthouse Society in 1863 and its clock-like mechanism must be wound every two-and-one-half hours by hand each night. We plan to visit it soon.
Our dinghy is our car that we drive to the government dock where we’ve learned that dinghy-docking manners here are to toss an anchor over the stern, grab the dock from the bow and tie to. The boat stays perpendicular to the dock no matter what the wind, and allows large and small boats to tie up without banging into each other.
We’ve taken three land courses so far. On rented bikes we peddled the length of the Cay to its south end where natives tell us the new rich build and speculate on real estate. The developments are attractive. Only one house we saw was hugely overdone. It looked like a series of attached coconut palm, beach huts cascading down a dune. They had a sign indicating it was a private home, no doubt in response to people wanting to know where to check in.
At one point, the macadam road becomes gravel as you traverse the top of a dune. It is where the Cay was cut in half by a recent hurricane, and the dune had to be bulldozed back into the land bridge between north and south ends. I can’t recall the name of the storm, but Bahamians remember the names and dates of hurricanes like the names and birthdates of intimates.
At the end of the gravel road perches the Abaco Inn where we had lunch. It is a place where your aunt and her widowed friends would return each year long after their husbands died, play cards, laugh, eat and sip moderately for the most part. Frame built, modest, warm, perched to view the extraordinary hues of the deep Atlantic to the east and the shallow Sea of Abaco to the west.
Another course is to walk straight east from the government dock, across the main road, onto a short cement paved walk over the dune to fine sand, crescent beaches where reefs lie close enough to shore to swim to and snorkel over. So far, that’s taken two afternoons.
The third course is to turn left from the dock and walk into “historic” Hopetown, where golf carts and other vehicles are forbidden. Main thoroughfares are the width of two sidewalks, cross streets the width of one. The settlement dates from 1785 when Loyalists with their slaves fled the new America. The houses are so dense that one forms a wall for the tiny yard of another, vegetation encroaches on the narrow streets and pulls these lots into a single garden of a town, not manicured by any means, but by happenstance or choice street corners turn you to mini-vistas that lure you on to the next juncture and the next. As we’ve wandered what can only be a few square blocks we’ve wondered several times whether we’d walked this street before, only to discover that, yes, from the opposite direction, and from this way it’s all new. The elevated porch of the local coffee house offers a perch where you see houses, plants and harbor overseen by Hope Town’s striped light house.
I read recently that the word paradise comes from the Persian and means “walled garden.” This journey is within walled gardens of our cabin, these Cays, Hope Town, places set apart, defined, limited and in their containment is contentment and freedom and wakefulness.
February 28, 2008
Bone Chilling Cold
The temperature for days has averaged 78 for a high and 75 for a low. The cabin of the boat rarely goes cooler than 75, until last night when the forecast called for a bone chilling low of 58 to 62. !” It supposed to warm up again soon, but we hardly call this suffering. There’s a volunteer, weather broadcaster on VHF in the evenings who put out a “cuddle alert” with this forecast to which another boater acknowledged: “Thanks for the cuddle alert, it’s been a long time.”
February 26, 2008
On Thursday, February 21st we left Green Turtle Cay for Marsh Harbor on Great Abaco Island to re-provision and to take in junior Junkanoo, a competition of what are called “gangs” from a town or school dressed in explosively bright costumes like mummers and participants in Carnival parades, very African, and very, very slow. It was to start at 6:30 and a two block, well-lit parade route was lined with Bahamians and tourists. Orotund speeches were given by local dignitaries, nothing happened. Officious looking judges with clip boards would walk back and forth, nothing happened. Then about 7:30 a group of darling five year olds went by. A couple of school buses arrived with kids in costumes, one from Fox Town where we had dropped off Roland. Nothing happened. Forty five minutes passed and another group went by. I went to check out food vendors and other sites, came back, and had missed nothing.
It was cool, we hadn’t had supper, and at 9:30 we decided to leave. Went to our dinghy and back to the boat anchored well out in the huge anchorage of Marsh Harbor, ate and went to bed to stir at three a.m. and hear the beat of drums coming from town. This was a junior competition. The real Junkanoo occurs on Boxing Day, December 26th and New Years Day with the biggest festival in Nassau. There are mixed accounts of its origins, but it seems to have originated in Ghana and came to North America with slavery. The instruments are goat skinned drums, cow bells, whistles, bones and rattles.
The Whale
Getting to Marsh Harbor on Great Abaco Island from Green Turtle Cay required us to go on the ocean side of Whale Cay, a passage notorious for big, irregular seas. Cruisers call it “The Whale.” It’s a treacherous passage because of its location at the edge of Little Bahama Bank, this great limestone submerged mesa that rises above the deep ocean floor that is covered by one to fifteen feet of water over virtually its entire expanse. Two big islands, Grand Bahama and Great Abaco are the largest land masses that protrude above the underwater mesa.
Our present cruising ground is the Sea of Abaco, a relatively sheltered body of water protected from the west by Great Abaco Island that is shaped like a bent leg with the thigh running from northwest to southeast, the knee at the location of Marsh Harbor, and the shin bone running due south. The Cays (pronounced “keys” but my brain keeps making me say “kays”) are much smaller islands that roughly parallel the coast of Great Abaco Island four to five miles to the east at the edge of the Bank. Most Cays are protected from the Atlantic by reefs a mile or so offshore, where brilliant white crests of waves break in contrast to the cobalt blue deep sea beyond. The cays shorelines vary from treacherous, jagged limestone to glorious fine-sand beaches. It is a spectacular landscape.
Poor old, uninhabited Whale Cay has two unfortunate characteristics. To its west, for the three or four miles between it and Great Abaco Island, lie Whale Cay sand shoals only passable by small boats, so we can’t sneak behind it in its lee to travel from Green Turtle Cay to Marsh Harbor. To the east of the Whale the water is deep, 36 feet or so, but there is a gap in the off-shore reef leaving the Cay fully exposed to the seas and swells of the Atlantic and a channel for the tide to rip. Four miles away the sea floor plummets to 900 feet.
The nearness of the Bank’s shelf, tides and seas can create a sea called hereabouts a rage, irregular steep, breaking. Boats are often stuck north or south of the Whale for days awaiting the right conditions. The one and one-half mile long Whale lies exposed to the northeast. We opted for a day when winds were forecasted 10 to 15 from the southeast and to make the passage along its face at about high tide. As usual, forecasts of 10 to 15 translate to 15 to 20, seas were capped and breaking, about three to four feet, lumpy and irregular mix of swells and waves, but readily passable with the jib out and motor on.
The distance to come through the gap between the barrier reef and the northwest end of the Whale to going back through the gap at the Southeast end is only about four miles, but it took a full hour with Journey stalled by plunging into steep seas in what could be considered moderate conditions. Traversing this passage in strong blows from anywhere north to east with current going out could be horrific.
There’s a warning in the Gulf Stream and Whale passages. Don’t be fooled by warm, crystal clear air and water. They lure you like the witch’s ginger bread and gumdrops cabin and you will be eaten alive.
Marsh Harbor is a market town, a version of any rural community that has the only shopping for miles around: dusty, busy, offering a few more choices. We were on a mission to solve our technical disconnectedness. The Bahamas Telephone Office clerk took a look at our new, first class, multi-function Verizon telephones and said “these are the wrong kind of phones to work here.” Further more, she added, “Verizon keeps telling people they have a roaming agreement with us and they don’t.” She had phones, for hundreds of dollars, but suggested we go to one of three shops that sell cheaper phones in which you can insert a chip and code in pre-paid minutes. She recommended one particular store, turns out that it was run by a sister of one of BaTelCo’s employees.
We found an LG phone, same brand as ours, that will use the same 12 volt charger. It’s a tiny thing of unknown vintage and origin with few functions. She put the chip in it to activate it, loaded the pre-purchased usage minutes, and we then looked at the written instructions which were printed in every language but English. The clerk was apologetic, said we could return the phone, but not the $60 of minutes. We’ve figured it out enough and can at least reach and be reached quickly should the need arise. Verizon has agreed to suspend and not charge us for our service, so it works out to a wash.
We also called on Out Island Internet Services and met with a pallid American (remember this is the sun filled Bahamas) who should have had a plastic pocket protector, very intense and very techy. His sales pitch went something like; none of the wifi antennas are any good but we have an antenna and bridge box for $235 that runs off of AC only that converts to 12 volts but don’t plug it into your battery directly because that will fry it, that comes with software that is too technical for you to use so we found easier software that we sell for $50 but its from Brazil and all but the one screen you need is in Portuguese, but we never need to look at the other screens, and this should allow you to get our wifi signal from your boat around the Sea of Abaco for a coast $120 a month to subscribe but no guarantees and no returns. We decided to pass.
Maxwell’s Super Market was big and well stocked and now we are re-stocked, carried the stuff three blocks to the dinghy dock to be greeted by a guy, clearly on something, who “helped” by untying the dinghy, wouldn’t let go and asked for a dollar like the squeegee guys who used to clean your windshields at intersections in New York whether you asked them to or not. It makes one feel a bit insecure, but so far no one locks boats or dinghies and we’re assured security is not a problem. Bahamas squeegee man is not found in any of the cruising guides.
Did laundry at the Marsh Harbor Marina and ran into Pat and Gary who Roland, M. and I had gone to greet at Sale Cay when we saw their hailing port was Salina, KS. Roland’s family was from Salina. They, like us, were signing up for a steak night at the Marina’s Jib Room restaurant, were anchored not far from us, so we went together. Gary ran for more than 30 years a service agency in Salina for disabled people and Pat was a special education teacher. They retired to the Seattle area on an Island near Olympia, where daughter and granddaughter live, have a trawler there, and keep their beautifully restored 1966 Pearson 42 in Fort Lauderdale for cruising the Bahamas in the winter. We ended up back on their boat for a night cap after truly terrific strip steaks and – heaven forbid – stayed up until midnight for the first time of the entire trip!
Overboard Drill
We have four reusable orange juice-size cups that we found are the right height to hold open the v-berth hatch just a little bit when it’s too breezy to be opened wide. When removing said cup by reaching up from below it slipped from my hand, clicked across the deck and silence. A later survey of the deck revealed the cup lost at sea, making the Admiral none to happy, envisioning two sharing one orange juice cup. Coming back from Marsh Harbor Marina six hours later, the dinghy laden with laundry, the Admiral yells stop, and there half submerged, about a mile from our boat at anchor, bobbed the errant yellow cup. Pulled to safety and resuscitated we toast its health and ours with juice.
February 27, 2008
Hope Town
Anchor up on February 24 to leave Marsh Harbor for Hope Town on Elbow Cay only about 8 miles away. Motored half the way and sailed the rest in time to make the entrance to the harbor near high tide. There’s only 5 feet at low at some points and we draw five-and-a-half feet. We’ve become inured to one, two or three feet under the keel. The terror is partly diminished because the bottom is fairly even; shallow stays shallow for long stretches, not rapidly shallower.
Hope Town, like New Plymouth, captures you. We’ve been moored here for four days and have no definite plans to leave.
You enter Hope Town Harbor through a 100 foot wide s-shaped channel into a pool hidden from the sea, roughly a half mile square in area walled by low, vegetation covered dunes and a shoreline of three funky marinas on the western shore and Hopetown’s wood frame, pastel houses and stores cheek to jowl near the harbor entrance on the northeastern side. At night the shore is dotted with low-wattage, incandescent lights, while the five pulses of a yellow beam arc over your head from the kerosene mantle shining through the rotating Fresnel lens of Hope Town’s lighthouse. It was built by the British Imperial Lighthouse Society in 1863 and its clock-like mechanism must be wound every two-and-one-half hours by hand each night. We plan to visit it soon.
Our dinghy is our car that we drive to the government dock where we’ve learned that dinghy-docking manners here are to toss an anchor over the stern, grab the dock from the bow and tie to. The boat stays perpendicular to the dock no matter what the wind, and allows large and small boats to tie up without banging into each other.
We’ve taken three land courses so far. On rented bikes we peddled the length of the Cay to its south end where natives tell us the new rich build and speculate on real estate. The developments are attractive. Only one house we saw was hugely overdone. It looked like a series of attached coconut palm, beach huts cascading down a dune. They had a sign indicating it was a private home, no doubt in response to people wanting to know where to check in.
At one point, the macadam road becomes gravel as you traverse the top of a dune. It is where the Cay was cut in half by a recent hurricane, and the dune had to be bulldozed back into the land bridge between north and south ends. I can’t recall the name of the storm, but Bahamians remember the names and dates of hurricanes like the names and birthdates of intimates.
At the end of the gravel road perches the Abaco Inn where we had lunch. It is a place where your aunt and her widowed friends would return each year long after their husbands died, play cards, laugh, eat and sip moderately for the most part. Frame built, modest, warm, perched to view the extraordinary hues of the deep Atlantic to the east and the shallow Sea of Abaco to the west.
Another course is to walk straight east from the government dock, across the main road, onto a short cement paved walk over the dune to fine sand, crescent beaches where reefs lie close enough to shore to swim to and snorkel over. So far, that’s taken two afternoons.
The third course is to turn left from the dock and walk into “historic” Hopetown, where golf carts and other vehicles are forbidden. Main thoroughfares are the width of two sidewalks, cross streets the width of one. The settlement dates from 1785 when Loyalists with their slaves fled the new America. The houses are so dense that one forms a wall for the tiny yard of another, vegetation encroaches on the narrow streets and pulls these lots into a single garden of a town, not manicured by any means, but by happenstance or choice street corners turn you to mini-vistas that lure you on to the next juncture and the next. As we’ve wandered what can only be a few square blocks we’ve wondered several times whether we’d walked this street before, only to discover that, yes, from the opposite direction, and from this way it’s all new. The elevated porch of the local coffee house offers a perch where you see houses, plants and harbor overseen by Hope Town’s striped light house.
I read recently that the word paradise comes from the Persian and means “walled garden.” This journey is within walled gardens of our cabin, these Cays, Hope Town, places set apart, defined, limited and in their containment is contentment and freedom and wakefulness.
February 28, 2008
Bone Chilling Cold
The temperature for days has averaged 78 for a high and 75 for a low. The cabin of the boat rarely goes cooler than 75, until last night when the forecast called for a bone chilling low of 58 to 62. !” It supposed to warm up again soon, but we hardly call this suffering. There’s a volunteer, weather broadcaster on VHF in the evenings who put out a “cuddle alert” with this forecast to which another boater acknowledged: “Thanks for the cuddle alert, it’s been a long time.”
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Re-Connection
February 16, 2008
On the chart, Spanish Cay marina is clearly surrounded by a breakwater offering protection from all quarters. When we arrived, Richard on the dock bluntly warned us to put out all the dock lines we had on board as there was little protection, particularly from the south and southeast. The breakwater would cover at high tide, information that he failed to impart when we radioed him before we left Hawksbill Cay to ask if he had room for three boats.
There were only six other boats among the 85 slips available. It was like going into a Chinese restaurant to find only two grim customers in a corner. You tend to turn around and leave, but we had no place else to go. We had been motoring into the building wind for four hours to go about 18 miles. There wasn’t another marina in traveling distance and we didn’t want to be on anchor for the forecasted gale. Sometimes even the Bates’ Motel looks good.
We rolled, bucked and strained lashed to pilings at Spanish Cay in more ways than one for three days and nights. Clear weather, hard blows shifted to squall lines that we tracked on the radar for practice. It didn’t rain a lot of the time, but when it did Journey was doused on high with buckets of water, enough to not only rinse away the salt, but some dirt too.
The Marina office-restaurant-bar-gift-shop building was in good shape with a gracious porch and comfortable gliders and rocking chairs. Guest rooms were in groups of four or so in free standing buildings, some around the Marina, others on the east side of the Cay facing the ocean. They were not old. The paint was fairly good. Not a one was occupied.
Richard was the only steady staff presence with whom we got to chatting with while hanging out one morning catching up on e-mails via the $10/day wi-fi connection and he fixed us breakfast. He wasn’t the manager, he was the chef, but seemed to attend to all matter of things. He was a native of Amsterdam, became a banker in Britain, spent time in Philadelphia and now lives on this two mile long Cay year around. We learned that there is a small work crew that commutes from Cooperstown a few miles across Abaco Sound and the landscaping is let go a bit because it’s too expensive to hire a large enough crew to take care of it.
What is this place? Steve on Sea Duck, a student of architecture and a pilot, noted later that the infrastructure was deteriorating and the 5,000 foot runway that runs the length of half of the Cay wouldn’t pass the test of insurance companies as a safe place for a plane to land. Richard told him it cost $1000 a day to generate electricity and desalinate water.
The fact that the whole scheme of the place didn’t seem to work gnawed on the six of us. Our sense of disconnection became more acute when Nancy learned via e-mail that her daughter in Boston had given birth prematurely. Coincidentally, she had planned to fly from Marsh harbor to Boston to attend a baby shower on Thursday. She was able to hitch a ride Thursday morning on the work boat to Cooperstown to make a taxi to Marsh Harbor.
That same day the wind shifted to the north and lessened and we all fled Spanish Cay. Sea Duck, our scout, paddled ahead of Troubadour, soloed by Ed, and Journey as we sailed a splendid 18-mile broad reach that timed our entrance into Black sound on Green Turtle Cay at high tide. We grabbed a mooring, went to the marina named on the mooring ball, but found nobody about and walked into the town of New Plymouth, established circa 1776 by loyalists and former slaves fleeing the American Revolution.
The streets are about the size of a bike path to accommodate golf carts, but there is no golf course on Green Turtle Cay. Carts are the trucks and cars of natives and vacationers to get about on the few miles of roads on the Island. Stores, shops, and houses intermingle along these narrow lanes, roosters crow, a radio can be heard, people in carts stop to visit with pedestrians. You get offered rides. While taking a picture of the town a little girl, not more than four or five started to visit. A small truck went by. “Hi Uncle Ben,” she said. New Plymouth is where Bahamians live. The visitors occupy houses away from town, they and their houses are separate and by themselves.
We lunched on delicious conch ceviche on the screened in porch of the local café and watched three American men perambulate the town with a halo of friendship around them. They strolled onto our porch, told of their ownership of a Moorings charter boat out of Marsh Harbor, their stories of starting and sustaining a sailing program for kids in Fort Myers, where to go locally for supplies and other good spots to go in the Bahamas.
In the evenings we’ve been going to a place called the Other Shore Club that offers free wifi and two-for-one rum punches between five and six. You sit, sip, and surf in the sun set.
We touch base daily with our little, new community. Ed reports from Nancy now in Boston that daughter and grand daughter are fine and she will be helping the new mom for awhile. Sally and Steve on Sea Duck hosted us all for dinner to celebrate Canada’s Flag Day. More of our stories unfold and we learn of previous lives in the Canadian Army, social work, college administration, and in journalism as an upstate New York newspaper reporter. We learn of earlier boats owned that include a Sabre 28 sailed on Lake Ontario, and a large Ketch that Steve built and leased to the Canadian Army and that he captained as an Outward-Bound like training experience for enlisted men and officers. We learn of sailing voyages to Cuba with errant crew, Nancy and Ed weathering a great lake’s gale in a Rhodes 19, and savor our 70 years or more of combined experience on the water among the three boats. It is a group that can depend on each other.
We are soaking it all in, happily staying put for awhile, puttering on the boat, walking, riding rental bikes, thinking about a snorkeling trip, easily opening conversations with strangers that turn into invitations for tea, reading good books, and taking long walks on an archetypical, nearly deserted tropical crescent beach on a crystal clear lagoon.
We are living basically. We filled our water tanks with 70 gallons of cistern collected rain water that cost 30-cents a gallon. We rinse dishes with the saltwater foot pump, and wash with the fresh water foot pump, rarely turning on the luxurious gusher offered by the boat’s electric water pressure system. There’s a good shower at the marina that owns the mooring we’re on, and we seem to be the only ones using it. An errant twig under the bench hasn’t moved in four days.
We turn on few lights, dine by a single candle, in order to shorten the daily engine run time required to recharge batteries and produce enough power to re-chill the cold plate in the refrigerator.
Grocery store shelves are partially stocked and tired produce further ages in glass walled coolers. We can’t get a newspaper, radio reception is poor, Verizon Cell phones don’t work. There are TV’s in bars tuned to satellite talk shows which are avoided at all cost. Our only link is that good wifi connection at the tiki bar where we do e-mails, will post the blog and use that amazing internet service called Skype to call family. We feel from time to time cut off from news, but are hard-pressed to read the NY Times on line as the sun sets into Abaco Bay. We are deeply content.
Thoreau writes in Walden that he went to the woods because he wanted to “live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Yesterday, on our beach walk we came to a rise in the sand that the tide could barely cover and a few mangrove trees – no more than bushes a few feet tall – had rooted and sent rays of runners beneath the sand evidenced by hundreds of upright sticks, new mini- trees that these mangrove mother hens were incubating beneath them. That life on the barren white sand in the face of the sea, that instant of seeing like other instances on this journey is, as Thoreau put it, “to see God himself culminate in the present moment.”
Companionship with creation and creator in simplicity and solitude are so easily severed by the littlest irks that again free the shades of loneliness and fear, and there-in lies the necessity of that other vital connection, the human family that supports and comforts – the new community of boat crews, and the old one of New Plymouth that in its lanes and clustered houses and children playing celebrates our connectedness, to know and to be known. “Hi, Uncle Ben.”
On the chart, Spanish Cay marina is clearly surrounded by a breakwater offering protection from all quarters. When we arrived, Richard on the dock bluntly warned us to put out all the dock lines we had on board as there was little protection, particularly from the south and southeast. The breakwater would cover at high tide, information that he failed to impart when we radioed him before we left Hawksbill Cay to ask if he had room for three boats.
There were only six other boats among the 85 slips available. It was like going into a Chinese restaurant to find only two grim customers in a corner. You tend to turn around and leave, but we had no place else to go. We had been motoring into the building wind for four hours to go about 18 miles. There wasn’t another marina in traveling distance and we didn’t want to be on anchor for the forecasted gale. Sometimes even the Bates’ Motel looks good.
We rolled, bucked and strained lashed to pilings at Spanish Cay in more ways than one for three days and nights. Clear weather, hard blows shifted to squall lines that we tracked on the radar for practice. It didn’t rain a lot of the time, but when it did Journey was doused on high with buckets of water, enough to not only rinse away the salt, but some dirt too.
The Marina office-restaurant-bar-gift-shop building was in good shape with a gracious porch and comfortable gliders and rocking chairs. Guest rooms were in groups of four or so in free standing buildings, some around the Marina, others on the east side of the Cay facing the ocean. They were not old. The paint was fairly good. Not a one was occupied.
Richard was the only steady staff presence with whom we got to chatting with while hanging out one morning catching up on e-mails via the $10/day wi-fi connection and he fixed us breakfast. He wasn’t the manager, he was the chef, but seemed to attend to all matter of things. He was a native of Amsterdam, became a banker in Britain, spent time in Philadelphia and now lives on this two mile long Cay year around. We learned that there is a small work crew that commutes from Cooperstown a few miles across Abaco Sound and the landscaping is let go a bit because it’s too expensive to hire a large enough crew to take care of it.
What is this place? Steve on Sea Duck, a student of architecture and a pilot, noted later that the infrastructure was deteriorating and the 5,000 foot runway that runs the length of half of the Cay wouldn’t pass the test of insurance companies as a safe place for a plane to land. Richard told him it cost $1000 a day to generate electricity and desalinate water.
The fact that the whole scheme of the place didn’t seem to work gnawed on the six of us. Our sense of disconnection became more acute when Nancy learned via e-mail that her daughter in Boston had given birth prematurely. Coincidentally, she had planned to fly from Marsh harbor to Boston to attend a baby shower on Thursday. She was able to hitch a ride Thursday morning on the work boat to Cooperstown to make a taxi to Marsh Harbor.
That same day the wind shifted to the north and lessened and we all fled Spanish Cay. Sea Duck, our scout, paddled ahead of Troubadour, soloed by Ed, and Journey as we sailed a splendid 18-mile broad reach that timed our entrance into Black sound on Green Turtle Cay at high tide. We grabbed a mooring, went to the marina named on the mooring ball, but found nobody about and walked into the town of New Plymouth, established circa 1776 by loyalists and former slaves fleeing the American Revolution.
The streets are about the size of a bike path to accommodate golf carts, but there is no golf course on Green Turtle Cay. Carts are the trucks and cars of natives and vacationers to get about on the few miles of roads on the Island. Stores, shops, and houses intermingle along these narrow lanes, roosters crow, a radio can be heard, people in carts stop to visit with pedestrians. You get offered rides. While taking a picture of the town a little girl, not more than four or five started to visit. A small truck went by. “Hi Uncle Ben,” she said. New Plymouth is where Bahamians live. The visitors occupy houses away from town, they and their houses are separate and by themselves.
We lunched on delicious conch ceviche on the screened in porch of the local café and watched three American men perambulate the town with a halo of friendship around them. They strolled onto our porch, told of their ownership of a Moorings charter boat out of Marsh Harbor, their stories of starting and sustaining a sailing program for kids in Fort Myers, where to go locally for supplies and other good spots to go in the Bahamas.
In the evenings we’ve been going to a place called the Other Shore Club that offers free wifi and two-for-one rum punches between five and six. You sit, sip, and surf in the sun set.
We touch base daily with our little, new community. Ed reports from Nancy now in Boston that daughter and grand daughter are fine and she will be helping the new mom for awhile. Sally and Steve on Sea Duck hosted us all for dinner to celebrate Canada’s Flag Day. More of our stories unfold and we learn of previous lives in the Canadian Army, social work, college administration, and in journalism as an upstate New York newspaper reporter. We learn of earlier boats owned that include a Sabre 28 sailed on Lake Ontario, and a large Ketch that Steve built and leased to the Canadian Army and that he captained as an Outward-Bound like training experience for enlisted men and officers. We learn of sailing voyages to Cuba with errant crew, Nancy and Ed weathering a great lake’s gale in a Rhodes 19, and savor our 70 years or more of combined experience on the water among the three boats. It is a group that can depend on each other.
We are soaking it all in, happily staying put for awhile, puttering on the boat, walking, riding rental bikes, thinking about a snorkeling trip, easily opening conversations with strangers that turn into invitations for tea, reading good books, and taking long walks on an archetypical, nearly deserted tropical crescent beach on a crystal clear lagoon.
We are living basically. We filled our water tanks with 70 gallons of cistern collected rain water that cost 30-cents a gallon. We rinse dishes with the saltwater foot pump, and wash with the fresh water foot pump, rarely turning on the luxurious gusher offered by the boat’s electric water pressure system. There’s a good shower at the marina that owns the mooring we’re on, and we seem to be the only ones using it. An errant twig under the bench hasn’t moved in four days.
We turn on few lights, dine by a single candle, in order to shorten the daily engine run time required to recharge batteries and produce enough power to re-chill the cold plate in the refrigerator.
Grocery store shelves are partially stocked and tired produce further ages in glass walled coolers. We can’t get a newspaper, radio reception is poor, Verizon Cell phones don’t work. There are TV’s in bars tuned to satellite talk shows which are avoided at all cost. Our only link is that good wifi connection at the tiki bar where we do e-mails, will post the blog and use that amazing internet service called Skype to call family. We feel from time to time cut off from news, but are hard-pressed to read the NY Times on line as the sun sets into Abaco Bay. We are deeply content.
Thoreau writes in Walden that he went to the woods because he wanted to “live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Yesterday, on our beach walk we came to a rise in the sand that the tide could barely cover and a few mangrove trees – no more than bushes a few feet tall – had rooted and sent rays of runners beneath the sand evidenced by hundreds of upright sticks, new mini- trees that these mangrove mother hens were incubating beneath them. That life on the barren white sand in the face of the sea, that instant of seeing like other instances on this journey is, as Thoreau put it, “to see God himself culminate in the present moment.”
Companionship with creation and creator in simplicity and solitude are so easily severed by the littlest irks that again free the shades of loneliness and fear, and there-in lies the necessity of that other vital connection, the human family that supports and comforts – the new community of boat crews, and the old one of New Plymouth that in its lanes and clustered houses and children playing celebrates our connectedness, to know and to be known. “Hi, Uncle Ben.”
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
We made it
February 8, 2007
In the Bahamas
We are free, very free from the confines of the Intra Coastal Waterway. We are sailing on the Little Bahama Bank in 14 feet of water on a reach just forward of the beam, watching the shadow of Journey’s sails pace us on the white sand bottom. We’re doing 6.7 knots with 8 knots of wind, pulled by the red, white and blue reaching spinnaker, accompanied by two other boats we met last night at the West End of Grand Bahama Island. It’s 80 degrees. We plan to anchor tonight in the lee of Mangrove Cay. It’s glorious. It’s the pay-off.
Getting Here
Roland B. shipped on last Monday for the Bahamas crossing and drove us about on Tuesday to the marine store to restock oil filters and to provision fresh goods in the now well-working refrigerator. Ran into a diver whose truck had a “Ghost Busters” like sign, “Barnacle Busters”. Wet-suited Danny offered to inspect our zincs and reported he could find none on the propeller shaft, a rather alarming report. Another call to our Maine boat yard revealed that Journey’s zincs are bars bolted to the hull on either side just forward of the propeller. Those were inspected, found to be in good shape. We purchased a spare set to have on board for our own monitoring and replacement if necessary while in the Bahamas. (For non boaters, zinc is used as a sacrificial metal to counter the corroding influences of the combination of electrical currents in the water and sea water. Without zinc offering its life as the least noble metal, things like props, shafts, and valves that let water out and into the boat, rot and fall off. Not a good thing.)
D –Day
Wednesday was D-Day for crossing the Gulf Stream from Palm Beach to West End, Grand Bahama Island, locked in by a consistent forecast over the previous five days of winds of from ten to fifteen from the south, ideal for the due east crossing of the northerly flowing stream to the closest landfall in the Bahamas. Cruising guides say wait for anything but wind from the north, which blows against the current and piles seas into big lumps that have earned the moniker of elephants.
We staged ourselves for an early morning departure by moving from the North Palm Beach Marina to an anchorage nearer to Palm Beach Inlet. We verified NOAA’s forecast of winds 10 to 15 out of the south on the radio at 3:00 AM, in spite of the wind holding more SE and gusting up to 16 or 17. Anchor up at 3:50, steered our way to the South of Peanut Island, ran aground on a tongue of sand extending further than charted, slewed beam-to the current, were washed off by the flood tied, regrouped, motored through the inlet, noting breakers over the sea wall, and began the 54 nautical mile passage.
It was dark and rough, but we anticipated the wind easing and moving more south from southeast. The Gulf Stream flows north, up to two-and-one-half knots. You sail across it like you canoe across the current of the river; the boat must be angled upstream in order to make progress across the river roughly perpendicular to the direction of the current. Journey side-stepped her way for three hours, leaving an irregular easterly trail on the chart plotter, all the while her nose more southeasterly into the current and the wind and waves, that far from diminishing were increasing, blowing steadily 17 to 20 knots, and the waves building from the forecast two to four feet to three to seven feet, stomping, trumpeting and flapping their ears.
We thought the compass was way out of alignment. The chart plotter said we were making a course of 1000, but the compass was showing 120 to 125, and in our now queasy and foggy state it took us awhile to realize the compass was showing the orientation of the boat, the direction the bow was pointing, not our course, while the plotter was showing the course we were making over the ground. The dispiriting reality was that we were already north of the straight line between Palm Beach and the West End and as the hours ground on we would be forced to point the boat ever more southerly into building waves and wind, we decided to turn back.
It is the first time that we’ve sailed into the wind going one direction, reversed course and were sailing into the wind going the opposite direction. Going east the boat crabbed south. Going west the boat crabbed south. The wind moved more southerly, and voila, we’re sailing into the wind.
We again dropped anchor having traveled 41 miles in eight hours, half sailing, half motor sailing to arrive a few hundred yards from where we began. We were wet, tired and a bit irked when the NOAA forecast had now issued small craft warnings. The vee berth was wet at the foot from water coming down the anchor hawse pipe and splashing through the louvered doors of the chain locker. We rinsed the salt off of our clothes, bedding and ourselves, festooned the boat with laundry, ate lunch, drank wine and beer, ate dinner and went dead asleep by 8:00 well fueled for a second 3:00 AM wake-up and a second try.
D-Day 2
We slept like logs. The wind was blowing 12, a bit more southerly when we headed out again, took a slightly longer route to the inlet to avoid the shoal and greeted much quieter seas, but still blowing strong. It blew 15 to 17 all day but more southerly and the seas had significantly subsided. We motored the first half and sailed the second of the nearly 11 hours it took for the boat to travel 72 miles through the water to make a 54 mile, straight-line course. We headed south close to Palm Beach where the current was somewhat less, stayed below the line for most of the day, then gradually fell off the wind for the last third in growing seas that would occasionally break at deck height and sop the helmsperson. We arrived at the West End at 3:00, filled out six pages of forms, cleared customs and immigration, swam in the marina pool, and met the crew of Troubadour who had accompanied us by chance across the Stream, the same crew we met by radio in the St. John River a few weeks ago when both of us headed offshore to avoid the closed bridge south on the ICW.
Today’s glorious sail ended at anchorage off of Mangrove Cay with Troubadour, a 42 foot Tashiba, and Sea Duck, a lovingly restored 32 foot Grand Banks Trawler from New Brunswick with a four foot draft that led us deeper draft vessels through a shoal, unmarked channel at the start of the day. We snorkeled around the boat, scrubbed some of the Brunswick scum off of the water line, pulled ourselves down the anchor rode to peer at the amazing Rocna achor dug into the sand of the bottom. There’s little apparent life in the sea. The primary clue to creatures beneath are volcano like mounds of sand that must hide something.
February 9, 2008
Accompanied by Sea Duck and Troubadour we set sail in light southerlies from Mangrove Cay to Great Sale (sic) Cay, a better place to weather the predicted “norther” cold front expected that night that promised heavy winds and rain. Another day of very light winds, with the reaching spinnaker carrying us along about a knot and a half slower than the breeze, until with a sigh it sagged in the lack of air and we motored to anchorage in a snug harbor protected from all but the south. Another boat coming into the harbor pointed and yelled for us to look in a direction we feared was an unseen reef, but instead was a loggerhead turtle cruising on the surface.
Steve and Sally on Sea Duck sent an invitation to Ed and Nancy on Troubadour and our crew for refreshments at 5:00. We had become a flotilla of mutual support for crews all experiencing their Bahamas for the first time.
The wind had shifted to the north from the south west, still a breeze, when we arrived back at the boat and Roland wisely suggested that we back down again on the anchor with the engine to reset it. It would likely reset on its own, but a good idea that seemed a great idea when in the middle of the night the rain poured, wind howled (probably thirty to forty knots, lightning flashed and thunder boomed and we held fast.
February10, 2008
Clear, fresh, northwest winds, and a boat salt free. We sailed on a close reach in winds that built to a steady 20 to 25 knots to Hawksbill Cay, which offers a lee from the strong north winds. It’s just off Fox Town, the northern-most settlement of Little Abaco Island which nearly touches Great Abaco Island, and a place that offered a chance for Roland to get to an airport for his return and to find gas and a gas can for our dinghy outboard. Our can was lashed to the deck, clearly not well enough, for it was lost the first day of trying to cross the Gulf Stream. On the second day out we said we joked that we should look for it, a fool’s errand in those seas and current.
Set anchor and the riding sail that M. crafted last summer from a kit. It rides on the back stay with a sheet forward. Keeps the boat from swinging its sides into the wind and thus reduces the pull on the anchor. At the end of the day Journey and we are grainy with salt, again. Aargh!
February 11, 2008
The evolving weather was going to make Journey’s progress mighty slow south and east along the Abacos towards Treasure Cay, so with regret by all hands Roland and his duffle, M and I dropped into a bouncing dinghy in the hard blowing northeast wind and headed the mile or so to Fox Town, maybe thirty pastel painted buildings stretched along the highway, landed at the government pier, walked to the highway, stuck out thumbs that stopped the first passing car, asked about transportation to the Airport on Great Abaco, the driver said he’d take care of it, walked up the hill to the one-pump shell station, bar and pool hall. A few minutes later a car and driver arrived. Roland negotiated a price. The proprietess of the gas station took a picture of three of us, we hugged and said good-bye to one of the finest persons and crewman in the land. Thanks, good friend. (This is an inside aside to some of you who might read this: M. beat Roland in Bananagrams which we think precipitated his departure.)
We asked at two groceries and the gas station about a gas can. None to be found in town, but another proprietess at a small store assured us plastic water bottles would hold gas and gave us an empty. We bought about a half gallon from the other gas station in town, topped off the dinghy tank and gave the remainder to a lobster fisherman, as we noted the gas was eating the bottle cap. They fish lobster from 18 foot Boston Whalers and none were going out today. He said the bottle holds gas forever, not the cap, and he’d use the gas to mow his lawn.
The flotilla of three determined that Hawksbill Cay was not the place to ride out predicted gale force winds from the south east so we headed to a marina about 12 miles away on Spanish Cay, a slow motor almost directly into the wind. Journey and we are now again crusted with salt, but with water costing 40-cents a gallon, we’ll wait for the rain at least for Journey. And rain and wind it will do. Ed of Troubadour is our weather guru and the various forecast sources predict a gale out of the southeast tonight and tomorrow. Journey is laced to pilings on both sides of the slip. She’s rolling and will roll a lot more.
In the Bahamas
We are free, very free from the confines of the Intra Coastal Waterway. We are sailing on the Little Bahama Bank in 14 feet of water on a reach just forward of the beam, watching the shadow of Journey’s sails pace us on the white sand bottom. We’re doing 6.7 knots with 8 knots of wind, pulled by the red, white and blue reaching spinnaker, accompanied by two other boats we met last night at the West End of Grand Bahama Island. It’s 80 degrees. We plan to anchor tonight in the lee of Mangrove Cay. It’s glorious. It’s the pay-off.
Getting Here
Roland B. shipped on last Monday for the Bahamas crossing and drove us about on Tuesday to the marine store to restock oil filters and to provision fresh goods in the now well-working refrigerator. Ran into a diver whose truck had a “Ghost Busters” like sign, “Barnacle Busters”. Wet-suited Danny offered to inspect our zincs and reported he could find none on the propeller shaft, a rather alarming report. Another call to our Maine boat yard revealed that Journey’s zincs are bars bolted to the hull on either side just forward of the propeller. Those were inspected, found to be in good shape. We purchased a spare set to have on board for our own monitoring and replacement if necessary while in the Bahamas. (For non boaters, zinc is used as a sacrificial metal to counter the corroding influences of the combination of electrical currents in the water and sea water. Without zinc offering its life as the least noble metal, things like props, shafts, and valves that let water out and into the boat, rot and fall off. Not a good thing.)
D –Day
Wednesday was D-Day for crossing the Gulf Stream from Palm Beach to West End, Grand Bahama Island, locked in by a consistent forecast over the previous five days of winds of from ten to fifteen from the south, ideal for the due east crossing of the northerly flowing stream to the closest landfall in the Bahamas. Cruising guides say wait for anything but wind from the north, which blows against the current and piles seas into big lumps that have earned the moniker of elephants.
We staged ourselves for an early morning departure by moving from the North Palm Beach Marina to an anchorage nearer to Palm Beach Inlet. We verified NOAA’s forecast of winds 10 to 15 out of the south on the radio at 3:00 AM, in spite of the wind holding more SE and gusting up to 16 or 17. Anchor up at 3:50, steered our way to the South of Peanut Island, ran aground on a tongue of sand extending further than charted, slewed beam-to the current, were washed off by the flood tied, regrouped, motored through the inlet, noting breakers over the sea wall, and began the 54 nautical mile passage.
It was dark and rough, but we anticipated the wind easing and moving more south from southeast. The Gulf Stream flows north, up to two-and-one-half knots. You sail across it like you canoe across the current of the river; the boat must be angled upstream in order to make progress across the river roughly perpendicular to the direction of the current. Journey side-stepped her way for three hours, leaving an irregular easterly trail on the chart plotter, all the while her nose more southeasterly into the current and the wind and waves, that far from diminishing were increasing, blowing steadily 17 to 20 knots, and the waves building from the forecast two to four feet to three to seven feet, stomping, trumpeting and flapping their ears.
We thought the compass was way out of alignment. The chart plotter said we were making a course of 1000, but the compass was showing 120 to 125, and in our now queasy and foggy state it took us awhile to realize the compass was showing the orientation of the boat, the direction the bow was pointing, not our course, while the plotter was showing the course we were making over the ground. The dispiriting reality was that we were already north of the straight line between Palm Beach and the West End and as the hours ground on we would be forced to point the boat ever more southerly into building waves and wind, we decided to turn back.
It is the first time that we’ve sailed into the wind going one direction, reversed course and were sailing into the wind going the opposite direction. Going east the boat crabbed south. Going west the boat crabbed south. The wind moved more southerly, and voila, we’re sailing into the wind.
We again dropped anchor having traveled 41 miles in eight hours, half sailing, half motor sailing to arrive a few hundred yards from where we began. We were wet, tired and a bit irked when the NOAA forecast had now issued small craft warnings. The vee berth was wet at the foot from water coming down the anchor hawse pipe and splashing through the louvered doors of the chain locker. We rinsed the salt off of our clothes, bedding and ourselves, festooned the boat with laundry, ate lunch, drank wine and beer, ate dinner and went dead asleep by 8:00 well fueled for a second 3:00 AM wake-up and a second try.
D-Day 2
We slept like logs. The wind was blowing 12, a bit more southerly when we headed out again, took a slightly longer route to the inlet to avoid the shoal and greeted much quieter seas, but still blowing strong. It blew 15 to 17 all day but more southerly and the seas had significantly subsided. We motored the first half and sailed the second of the nearly 11 hours it took for the boat to travel 72 miles through the water to make a 54 mile, straight-line course. We headed south close to Palm Beach where the current was somewhat less, stayed below the line for most of the day, then gradually fell off the wind for the last third in growing seas that would occasionally break at deck height and sop the helmsperson. We arrived at the West End at 3:00, filled out six pages of forms, cleared customs and immigration, swam in the marina pool, and met the crew of Troubadour who had accompanied us by chance across the Stream, the same crew we met by radio in the St. John River a few weeks ago when both of us headed offshore to avoid the closed bridge south on the ICW.
Today’s glorious sail ended at anchorage off of Mangrove Cay with Troubadour, a 42 foot Tashiba, and Sea Duck, a lovingly restored 32 foot Grand Banks Trawler from New Brunswick with a four foot draft that led us deeper draft vessels through a shoal, unmarked channel at the start of the day. We snorkeled around the boat, scrubbed some of the Brunswick scum off of the water line, pulled ourselves down the anchor rode to peer at the amazing Rocna achor dug into the sand of the bottom. There’s little apparent life in the sea. The primary clue to creatures beneath are volcano like mounds of sand that must hide something.
February 9, 2008
Accompanied by Sea Duck and Troubadour we set sail in light southerlies from Mangrove Cay to Great Sale (sic) Cay, a better place to weather the predicted “norther” cold front expected that night that promised heavy winds and rain. Another day of very light winds, with the reaching spinnaker carrying us along about a knot and a half slower than the breeze, until with a sigh it sagged in the lack of air and we motored to anchorage in a snug harbor protected from all but the south. Another boat coming into the harbor pointed and yelled for us to look in a direction we feared was an unseen reef, but instead was a loggerhead turtle cruising on the surface.
Steve and Sally on Sea Duck sent an invitation to Ed and Nancy on Troubadour and our crew for refreshments at 5:00. We had become a flotilla of mutual support for crews all experiencing their Bahamas for the first time.
The wind had shifted to the north from the south west, still a breeze, when we arrived back at the boat and Roland wisely suggested that we back down again on the anchor with the engine to reset it. It would likely reset on its own, but a good idea that seemed a great idea when in the middle of the night the rain poured, wind howled (probably thirty to forty knots, lightning flashed and thunder boomed and we held fast.
February10, 2008
Clear, fresh, northwest winds, and a boat salt free. We sailed on a close reach in winds that built to a steady 20 to 25 knots to Hawksbill Cay, which offers a lee from the strong north winds. It’s just off Fox Town, the northern-most settlement of Little Abaco Island which nearly touches Great Abaco Island, and a place that offered a chance for Roland to get to an airport for his return and to find gas and a gas can for our dinghy outboard. Our can was lashed to the deck, clearly not well enough, for it was lost the first day of trying to cross the Gulf Stream. On the second day out we said we joked that we should look for it, a fool’s errand in those seas and current.
Set anchor and the riding sail that M. crafted last summer from a kit. It rides on the back stay with a sheet forward. Keeps the boat from swinging its sides into the wind and thus reduces the pull on the anchor. At the end of the day Journey and we are grainy with salt, again. Aargh!
February 11, 2008
The evolving weather was going to make Journey’s progress mighty slow south and east along the Abacos towards Treasure Cay, so with regret by all hands Roland and his duffle, M and I dropped into a bouncing dinghy in the hard blowing northeast wind and headed the mile or so to Fox Town, maybe thirty pastel painted buildings stretched along the highway, landed at the government pier, walked to the highway, stuck out thumbs that stopped the first passing car, asked about transportation to the Airport on Great Abaco, the driver said he’d take care of it, walked up the hill to the one-pump shell station, bar and pool hall. A few minutes later a car and driver arrived. Roland negotiated a price. The proprietess of the gas station took a picture of three of us, we hugged and said good-bye to one of the finest persons and crewman in the land. Thanks, good friend. (This is an inside aside to some of you who might read this: M. beat Roland in Bananagrams which we think precipitated his departure.)
We asked at two groceries and the gas station about a gas can. None to be found in town, but another proprietess at a small store assured us plastic water bottles would hold gas and gave us an empty. We bought about a half gallon from the other gas station in town, topped off the dinghy tank and gave the remainder to a lobster fisherman, as we noted the gas was eating the bottle cap. They fish lobster from 18 foot Boston Whalers and none were going out today. He said the bottle holds gas forever, not the cap, and he’d use the gas to mow his lawn.
The flotilla of three determined that Hawksbill Cay was not the place to ride out predicted gale force winds from the south east so we headed to a marina about 12 miles away on Spanish Cay, a slow motor almost directly into the wind. Journey and we are now again crusted with salt, but with water costing 40-cents a gallon, we’ll wait for the rain at least for Journey. And rain and wind it will do. Ed of Troubadour is our weather guru and the various forecast sources predict a gale out of the southeast tonight and tomorrow. Journey is laced to pilings on both sides of the slip. She’s rolling and will roll a lot more.
Monday, February 4, 2008
Ready for Launch to the Bahamas
February 2, 2008
By golly, we got a lot done in Vero Beach. The biggest accomplishment was to find another mechanical healer as skilled as Guy in Gloucester, this one a refrigeration expert with the unlikely name of Ty Cobb who undid the damage of earlier repairs and restored the fridge to an unprecedented level of functioning. Finally!
List of items and actions crossed off: stocked dry goods for the Bahamas from the Publix Super Market, unfolded and checked the dinghy, filled and lashed two five gallon jerry cans of extra diesel fuel to the deck, washed down the boat, cleaned the interior, changed the engine’s zinc, oil, oil filter and transmission fluid, filled the fresh water tanks, washed down and reorganized clothes closets, stored wool bedding in anticipation of leaving the cold behind, and befriended and helped a family in the slip next to us deal with “this old boat.”
The family: David and Ami and their girls, Margaret age eight and Emily age two, a cat, and Sally, a very large and friendly Newfoundland, on a 1979, 36 foot Catalina that they bought in Georgia after Christmas and have sailed and motored its 7-foot draft down the ICW with an intermittently functioning depth finder, freezing like all of the rest of us. David’s a film maker and Ami’s a designer, both from New York. Their boat, Intemperance, is pretty with a nicely curved sheer line, narrow in the bow and stern with top sides that are rounded and lean up and into the toe rail. She was a good racing boat and with the deep fin keel will out-sail and out-point Journey.
Helped them changed the oil with the loan of our hand pump to drain the sump and helped tighten the engine belt that drives the water pump and alternator on a square, big old Universal diesel. They were all set, took off the next day, only to hear over the Marina radio speaker minutes later a boat hail an approaching boat warning that it was the sail boat by marker 139 without power! The cell phone rang awhile later. It was David. The powerless sailboat was Intemperance, and we talked through why the engine was overheating. We next heard that they were heading back to the marina, this time to a mooring.
About six that evening, they brought their dinghy into shore to go for pizza and stopped by to see us. We told tales while Emily and Margaret ate trail mix like gerbils and we drank beer and wine. They had anchored three times, having thought they had the cooling problem solved only for the engine to overheat again. At one point they were forced to push the boat hand over hand along the bulwark to clear beneath a bridge, all the while Margaret was a trooper in keeping Emily entertained throughout the crisis. They honed in on a stuck thermostat, which they proudly displayed, which when removed the engine stayed running cool,.
I asked if they minded if I boiled their thermostat. which had been cleaned of some of its crud. They were puzzled for they did not see my father in 1960 or so showing brother Jim and me how to test the thermostat of our very used 1949 Studebaker by putting it in a pan of water on the stove, heating it and watching to see if it opened before the water reached boiling. Theirs did, probably because it had been cleaned. They’ll get a new one. They asked us our most harrowing experience and we comforted one another in telling stories of near misses, break downs, foolishness, and in spite of it all being unscathed and going back for more. I asked David how long he has wanted to do this, and without pause, he said “forever”.
I just finished Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut and read about Billy Pilgrim’s capacities as a time traveler who can revisit the past and, most startlingly, visit his future, segueing and overlapping with ease events from infancy to marriage to triumphant speeches, a plane crash, even his own death. We’ve been time travelers at Vero Beach. To the left on the time line, our past youth on display in the crew of Intemperance, taking on this old boat with such energy, and my father in the kitchen in Cedar Rapids, Iowa boiling a thermostat.
To the right on the time line we traveled to our future, disconcertingly looming in the Publix Super Market on a weekday mid afternoon where Florida’s geriatric set shuffles the aisles, using their shopping carts as walkers or humming by in electrified scooters, a man with a bandage over one eye helping his wife with a brace on her leg, others dazed and blinded by the light of the parking lot, a woman shuffling behind a cart with the frozen expression of Parkinson’s disease. Some combination of their futures is likely our futures.
Those lines of past and future lift like the edges of a funnel to tip the ingredients of the youthful adventures of Intemperance’s crew, boiling the thermostat, and the ancient couples supporting one another in the aisles of Publix into the vessel of this moment in this journey and make it all the more rich.
We left Vero Beach early this morning (February 2nd), feeling in order, made our way to Stuart into a lagoon called Manatee Pocket, very shallow, zero feet under the keel and moored at Pirates Cove Marina.
February 4, 2008 – Side Trip
We had e-mailed our friend Steve H. who spends a good deal of the winter in Florida in either Juno Beach which is near by Stuart or in Key West to see if we could connect. Steve is member in good standing of an informal sailing group, but his craft are of the air. He offered to fly in his plane from Key West to Stuart, pick-us up and fly us back to Key West for the weekend to watch the Super Bowl, then back to Stuart.
What a trip to see the Keys from the air, including a view we think of Roland B’s place on Key Largo from 7,500 feet, to spend time with Steve and his friends in Key West, toot around the island on bicycles and visit the most southern point in the US and the end of US Route 1, a highway which we have lived close to for 35 of the last 38 years as we migrated from Washington, DC to Baltimore, to Boston, to Maine. It was great to watch that game with people who could comfort one another over its outcome and to sleep in a real bed in his beautiful home.
We have settled into a marina in North Palm Beach, four miles north of the inlet to the sea that will take us to the Bahamas. Roland B. ships on tonight to join us for the Gulf Stream crossing and the first week in the Bahamas. The weather promises rare and ideal southerly winds.
We passed the 1000 mile marker on the ICW and we are anxious to leave its confines after negotiating the opening of eight bridges today, a record, dodging an increasing number of ridiculous boats, and seeing the umpteenth McMansion.
.
The next post will be via wifi when available in the Bahamas. Stay tuned.
By golly, we got a lot done in Vero Beach. The biggest accomplishment was to find another mechanical healer as skilled as Guy in Gloucester, this one a refrigeration expert with the unlikely name of Ty Cobb who undid the damage of earlier repairs and restored the fridge to an unprecedented level of functioning. Finally!
List of items and actions crossed off: stocked dry goods for the Bahamas from the Publix Super Market, unfolded and checked the dinghy, filled and lashed two five gallon jerry cans of extra diesel fuel to the deck, washed down the boat, cleaned the interior, changed the engine’s zinc, oil, oil filter and transmission fluid, filled the fresh water tanks, washed down and reorganized clothes closets, stored wool bedding in anticipation of leaving the cold behind, and befriended and helped a family in the slip next to us deal with “this old boat.”
The family: David and Ami and their girls, Margaret age eight and Emily age two, a cat, and Sally, a very large and friendly Newfoundland, on a 1979, 36 foot Catalina that they bought in Georgia after Christmas and have sailed and motored its 7-foot draft down the ICW with an intermittently functioning depth finder, freezing like all of the rest of us. David’s a film maker and Ami’s a designer, both from New York. Their boat, Intemperance, is pretty with a nicely curved sheer line, narrow in the bow and stern with top sides that are rounded and lean up and into the toe rail. She was a good racing boat and with the deep fin keel will out-sail and out-point Journey.
Helped them changed the oil with the loan of our hand pump to drain the sump and helped tighten the engine belt that drives the water pump and alternator on a square, big old Universal diesel. They were all set, took off the next day, only to hear over the Marina radio speaker minutes later a boat hail an approaching boat warning that it was the sail boat by marker 139 without power! The cell phone rang awhile later. It was David. The powerless sailboat was Intemperance, and we talked through why the engine was overheating. We next heard that they were heading back to the marina, this time to a mooring.
About six that evening, they brought their dinghy into shore to go for pizza and stopped by to see us. We told tales while Emily and Margaret ate trail mix like gerbils and we drank beer and wine. They had anchored three times, having thought they had the cooling problem solved only for the engine to overheat again. At one point they were forced to push the boat hand over hand along the bulwark to clear beneath a bridge, all the while Margaret was a trooper in keeping Emily entertained throughout the crisis. They honed in on a stuck thermostat, which they proudly displayed, which when removed the engine stayed running cool,.
I asked if they minded if I boiled their thermostat. which had been cleaned of some of its crud. They were puzzled for they did not see my father in 1960 or so showing brother Jim and me how to test the thermostat of our very used 1949 Studebaker by putting it in a pan of water on the stove, heating it and watching to see if it opened before the water reached boiling. Theirs did, probably because it had been cleaned. They’ll get a new one. They asked us our most harrowing experience and we comforted one another in telling stories of near misses, break downs, foolishness, and in spite of it all being unscathed and going back for more. I asked David how long he has wanted to do this, and without pause, he said “forever”.
I just finished Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut and read about Billy Pilgrim’s capacities as a time traveler who can revisit the past and, most startlingly, visit his future, segueing and overlapping with ease events from infancy to marriage to triumphant speeches, a plane crash, even his own death. We’ve been time travelers at Vero Beach. To the left on the time line, our past youth on display in the crew of Intemperance, taking on this old boat with such energy, and my father in the kitchen in Cedar Rapids, Iowa boiling a thermostat.
To the right on the time line we traveled to our future, disconcertingly looming in the Publix Super Market on a weekday mid afternoon where Florida’s geriatric set shuffles the aisles, using their shopping carts as walkers or humming by in electrified scooters, a man with a bandage over one eye helping his wife with a brace on her leg, others dazed and blinded by the light of the parking lot, a woman shuffling behind a cart with the frozen expression of Parkinson’s disease. Some combination of their futures is likely our futures.
Those lines of past and future lift like the edges of a funnel to tip the ingredients of the youthful adventures of Intemperance’s crew, boiling the thermostat, and the ancient couples supporting one another in the aisles of Publix into the vessel of this moment in this journey and make it all the more rich.
We left Vero Beach early this morning (February 2nd), feeling in order, made our way to Stuart into a lagoon called Manatee Pocket, very shallow, zero feet under the keel and moored at Pirates Cove Marina.
February 4, 2008 – Side Trip
We had e-mailed our friend Steve H. who spends a good deal of the winter in Florida in either Juno Beach which is near by Stuart or in Key West to see if we could connect. Steve is member in good standing of an informal sailing group, but his craft are of the air. He offered to fly in his plane from Key West to Stuart, pick-us up and fly us back to Key West for the weekend to watch the Super Bowl, then back to Stuart.
What a trip to see the Keys from the air, including a view we think of Roland B’s place on Key Largo from 7,500 feet, to spend time with Steve and his friends in Key West, toot around the island on bicycles and visit the most southern point in the US and the end of US Route 1, a highway which we have lived close to for 35 of the last 38 years as we migrated from Washington, DC to Baltimore, to Boston, to Maine. It was great to watch that game with people who could comfort one another over its outcome and to sleep in a real bed in his beautiful home.
We have settled into a marina in North Palm Beach, four miles north of the inlet to the sea that will take us to the Bahamas. Roland B. ships on tonight to join us for the Gulf Stream crossing and the first week in the Bahamas. The weather promises rare and ideal southerly winds.
We passed the 1000 mile marker on the ICW and we are anxious to leave its confines after negotiating the opening of eight bridges today, a record, dodging an increasing number of ridiculous boats, and seeing the umpteenth McMansion.
.
The next post will be via wifi when available in the Bahamas. Stay tuned.
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