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.”