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.”