Saturday, April 26, 2008
Little Harbor was the furthest point south that we will reach. Since August 19, 2007 we have logged 3,154 nautical miles and we are discovering that this journey is far more than a round trip from Maine to the Bahamas via Nova Scotia. This trip seems to be turning out to be the transit from becoming to being, the matriculation from making it to leaving it.
It is vividly making clear where we are in the life span. Recall those experiences in Vero Beach where we met the young couple, their two little kids, a Newfoundland and cat on a new, old boat they had just acquired, their confidence and foolishness and energy of youth on the move, juxtaposed with grocery shopping among the shuffling elderly in various states of disrepair cautiously maneuvering the aisles of the supermarket. We feel vigorous and healthy, but stay put more, sail less, sleep longer, creak a little getting out of bed. No doubt about what third or quarter of life we are in. Our future is clearly the supermarket of growing limitations.
It is disclosing the depth of metaphor. The instructors are Milton, Melville, Homer, Thoreau, the authors of the Bible and their critics, with time to sit at their knees and not be graded. The classroom is this daily intimacy with nature. The exercise is time to witness without blinders. The fruit is humility of truth. Recall the monarch butterflies that crossed our paths from Nova Scotia to the Delaware that revealed the wonders of tenacity, innocence, endurance, destination, beauty, cycles and seasons all captured in seeing, truly seeing their skipping through the air.
Living aboard Journey is revealing the value of living simply. These few square feet of living space, two feet of closets, only valued essential tools on board, our required stewardship of water, fuel and food reveal the liberation of Thoreau’s and Jesus’ economies. We now talk a lot about “destuffication” and simplification.
This journey has also changed our perspective of where we want to arrive. We will head for the safe harbor of Teel Cove, but we are beginning to see a more lasting goal for this time of transit. We hope that it will help us learn to live to the end of life in peace and grace enabled by the humility from seeing all of life, the sunsets and the shuffles. I hope we make it and will be able to stay there when we arrive.
Dinghy Drift
Jeff is one of the irrepressible anchors of the Abaco Cruisers Net from his boat Agur’s Wish in Hope Town and he organized last Monday a dinghy drift. You raft your dinghy with others at a point up wind in the harbor and drift where the wind will take you.. You bring along something to drink and something to nibble on to pass around from boat to boat. The hat would also be passed to collect money to send Abaco kids to an upcoming Special Olympics in Nassau.
Twenty four dinghies holding 67 people showed-up and gave over $600. Amazingly this huge raft of inflatables would drift through the moored boats not touching any. As we reached shore, three or four on the outside would crank up their outboards and push the whole mass of boats and people back up wind. We sang sea shanties, and met funky, funny people. It’s a hoot.
Special Needs Engine and Captain
Last Wednesday we sailed from Hope Town to Man-O-War to meet with Darrin, a highly recommended mechanic from Edwin’s Boat Yard. I remain hyper sensitive to our special needs engine and it seems that the rhythmic thump as the prop turns was getting noisier. I was wondering if the engine was getting out of alignment. One troublesome symptom was the engine would shake slightly if you let the shaft free wheel when sailing, the shaft’s turning powered by the spinning propeller acting like a waterwheel. Then a few weeks ago we had a scare. I went below while under power and noticed oil on the cabin sole. It’s the kind of thing that jolts you into quick action, sort of like the first sounds of your child at night coming down with the stomach flu. M. shuts down the engine and sets sail while I field strip the companion way ladder, the panel holding the fire extinguisher, and engine cowling galley drawer unit in that order and in seconds, to reveal our needy friend.
The rubber plug that stops up one of the oil fill openings on the engine had vibrated out, allowing oil to spurt all over the engine compartment, including through the cracks where the cowling fits and onto the cabin sole. The bulk of the mess had dripped into the bilge. I used tongs to fish the plug out of the oil spill, replaced it, added oil, and secured the plug with a wire tie which I should have done long ago, all in choppy, two to three foot seas. We restarted and we motored on into Marsh Harbor to clean up. Funny, that had never happened before, I worried. Could it be hyper engine vibration, or as M. thinks could it be much more benign, but equally irksome, hyper husband?
In the weeks that passed I would listen and worry until a doctor visit became essential. Darrin was reassuring that our engine is fine and I’m nuts. We went on a sea trial. He listened under power, under sail, at idle, at full RPM, felt and turned the shaft and then explained. The rhythmic noise was the result of a two bladed prop which is never as balanced as a three bladed prop. The movement of the engine when the prop freewheels is due to the two bladed prop, built-in, soft engine mounts, short shaft, and the flexibility of the recently installed shaft seal. He made sense and I’m relieved, but I do wonder about a new, rumbling sound that happens when…..
While waiting for carry-out at the only carry-out on Man-O-War, we ran into Nancy and Lauri. Nancy is delivered by Lauri in their Albury outboard each Thursday morning to the Hope Town Writer’s Circle where we had met. M. and I later walked to the north end of the Cay and heard someone hailing us. Stopped, went back and Nancy, Lauri and two young fellows were on their garage top deck, that serves as a widows walk, watching the approach of a Mystic Seaport square rigger and a newly built schooner. Nancy and Lauri have retired full-time to Man-O-War. Through the writers circle gatherings, lunches following and our conversations we’ve learned that Nancy was volunteer head of Rotary International’s international polio efforts and a stunt pilot, Lauri an internist, or as he put it an adult pediatrician, and hospital administrator in Cleveland. Their house is perched on a limestone ridge, 27 feet above sea level just past the narrows on Man-O-War which gives them views of the Sea of Abaco and the Atlantic. Hurricane Floyd hit them from both sides with water running under the house, but it survived without major damage. Their deck, like the deck on our shore shack in Maine, is seemingly suspended over the sea.
We left Man-O-War early Thursday on a brisk, jib-only beam reach back to Hope Town in time to make a session of the Writer’s Circle which has been noted before: lovely people expressing them selves deeply, getting encouragement and useful criticism. Several spend summers in Maine and we’ll work on constituting a group there. Lunch follows at the Harbors Edge restaurant. I alert M. via walkie-talkie and she dinghies into the restaurant and ties up five feet from the table to join us for lunch. We linger well into the afternoon.
Prep Time
Two weeks from today Steffi and Charlie arrive and its time for more maintenance. A mail order this morning of a standby toilet repair kit and a few other items are headed their way to in turn come our way. Took apart and cleaned the head to keep it limping along until parts can be replaced (why are sewer and garbage-related activities always my jobs?) while M. did laundry at Lighthouse Marina (why is that always her job?). Our list of to dos includes a coat of varnish, clean up the topsides and transom from six months of accumulation and scuffs, polish metal, lubricate the winches and windless, and make lists for supplies when we get to Marsh Harbor. Not many chores and we will likely have time for a bit more cruising on the Sea of Abaco before heading north.
It is vividly making clear where we are in the life span. Recall those experiences in Vero Beach where we met the young couple, their two little kids, a Newfoundland and cat on a new, old boat they had just acquired, their confidence and foolishness and energy of youth on the move, juxtaposed with grocery shopping among the shuffling elderly in various states of disrepair cautiously maneuvering the aisles of the supermarket. We feel vigorous and healthy, but stay put more, sail less, sleep longer, creak a little getting out of bed. No doubt about what third or quarter of life we are in. Our future is clearly the supermarket of growing limitations.
It is disclosing the depth of metaphor. The instructors are Milton, Melville, Homer, Thoreau, the authors of the Bible and their critics, with time to sit at their knees and not be graded. The classroom is this daily intimacy with nature. The exercise is time to witness without blinders. The fruit is humility of truth. Recall the monarch butterflies that crossed our paths from Nova Scotia to the Delaware that revealed the wonders of tenacity, innocence, endurance, destination, beauty, cycles and seasons all captured in seeing, truly seeing their skipping through the air.
Living aboard Journey is revealing the value of living simply. These few square feet of living space, two feet of closets, only valued essential tools on board, our required stewardship of water, fuel and food reveal the liberation of Thoreau’s and Jesus’ economies. We now talk a lot about “destuffication” and simplification.
This journey has also changed our perspective of where we want to arrive. We will head for the safe harbor of Teel Cove, but we are beginning to see a more lasting goal for this time of transit. We hope that it will help us learn to live to the end of life in peace and grace enabled by the humility from seeing all of life, the sunsets and the shuffles. I hope we make it and will be able to stay there when we arrive.
Dinghy Drift
Jeff is one of the irrepressible anchors of the Abaco Cruisers Net from his boat Agur’s Wish in Hope Town and he organized last Monday a dinghy drift. You raft your dinghy with others at a point up wind in the harbor and drift where the wind will take you.. You bring along something to drink and something to nibble on to pass around from boat to boat. The hat would also be passed to collect money to send Abaco kids to an upcoming Special Olympics in Nassau.
Twenty four dinghies holding 67 people showed-up and gave over $600. Amazingly this huge raft of inflatables would drift through the moored boats not touching any. As we reached shore, three or four on the outside would crank up their outboards and push the whole mass of boats and people back up wind. We sang sea shanties, and met funky, funny people. It’s a hoot.
Special Needs Engine and Captain
Last Wednesday we sailed from Hope Town to Man-O-War to meet with Darrin, a highly recommended mechanic from Edwin’s Boat Yard. I remain hyper sensitive to our special needs engine and it seems that the rhythmic thump as the prop turns was getting noisier. I was wondering if the engine was getting out of alignment. One troublesome symptom was the engine would shake slightly if you let the shaft free wheel when sailing, the shaft’s turning powered by the spinning propeller acting like a waterwheel. Then a few weeks ago we had a scare. I went below while under power and noticed oil on the cabin sole. It’s the kind of thing that jolts you into quick action, sort of like the first sounds of your child at night coming down with the stomach flu. M. shuts down the engine and sets sail while I field strip the companion way ladder, the panel holding the fire extinguisher, and engine cowling galley drawer unit in that order and in seconds, to reveal our needy friend.
The rubber plug that stops up one of the oil fill openings on the engine had vibrated out, allowing oil to spurt all over the engine compartment, including through the cracks where the cowling fits and onto the cabin sole. The bulk of the mess had dripped into the bilge. I used tongs to fish the plug out of the oil spill, replaced it, added oil, and secured the plug with a wire tie which I should have done long ago, all in choppy, two to three foot seas. We restarted and we motored on into Marsh Harbor to clean up. Funny, that had never happened before, I worried. Could it be hyper engine vibration, or as M. thinks could it be much more benign, but equally irksome, hyper husband?
In the weeks that passed I would listen and worry until a doctor visit became essential. Darrin was reassuring that our engine is fine and I’m nuts. We went on a sea trial. He listened under power, under sail, at idle, at full RPM, felt and turned the shaft and then explained. The rhythmic noise was the result of a two bladed prop which is never as balanced as a three bladed prop. The movement of the engine when the prop freewheels is due to the two bladed prop, built-in, soft engine mounts, short shaft, and the flexibility of the recently installed shaft seal. He made sense and I’m relieved, but I do wonder about a new, rumbling sound that happens when…..
While waiting for carry-out at the only carry-out on Man-O-War, we ran into Nancy and Lauri. Nancy is delivered by Lauri in their Albury outboard each Thursday morning to the Hope Town Writer’s Circle where we had met. M. and I later walked to the north end of the Cay and heard someone hailing us. Stopped, went back and Nancy, Lauri and two young fellows were on their garage top deck, that serves as a widows walk, watching the approach of a Mystic Seaport square rigger and a newly built schooner. Nancy and Lauri have retired full-time to Man-O-War. Through the writers circle gatherings, lunches following and our conversations we’ve learned that Nancy was volunteer head of Rotary International’s international polio efforts and a stunt pilot, Lauri an internist, or as he put it an adult pediatrician, and hospital administrator in Cleveland. Their house is perched on a limestone ridge, 27 feet above sea level just past the narrows on Man-O-War which gives them views of the Sea of Abaco and the Atlantic. Hurricane Floyd hit them from both sides with water running under the house, but it survived without major damage. Their deck, like the deck on our shore shack in Maine, is seemingly suspended over the sea.
We left Man-O-War early Thursday on a brisk, jib-only beam reach back to Hope Town in time to make a session of the Writer’s Circle which has been noted before: lovely people expressing them selves deeply, getting encouragement and useful criticism. Several spend summers in Maine and we’ll work on constituting a group there. Lunch follows at the Harbors Edge restaurant. I alert M. via walkie-talkie and she dinghies into the restaurant and ties up five feet from the table to join us for lunch. We linger well into the afternoon.
Prep Time
Two weeks from today Steffi and Charlie arrive and its time for more maintenance. A mail order this morning of a standby toilet repair kit and a few other items are headed their way to in turn come our way. Took apart and cleaned the head to keep it limping along until parts can be replaced (why are sewer and garbage-related activities always my jobs?) while M. did laundry at Lighthouse Marina (why is that always her job?). Our list of to dos includes a coat of varnish, clean up the topsides and transom from six months of accumulation and scuffs, polish metal, lubricate the winches and windless, and make lists for supplies when we get to Marsh Harbor. Not many chores and we will likely have time for a bit more cruising on the Sea of Abaco before heading north.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Ambivalence
We cast off our mooring at Hope Town last Thursday on an early morning high tide with ambivalence even though we will return at least once more. Our roots in Hope Town are shallow, but deep enough to give us nourishment and require a tug to free us to meet that other need for broader horizons. We’re wallowing in several consecutive days of settled weather for the first time since we’ve arrived here with winds five to ten knots out of the southeast, puffy clouds, deep blue skies and an increasingly emerald green sea.
We sailed with Nancy and Ed on Troubadour in light, variable winds, running west, jibing south, then heading up to go south east to make the required u-turn course around a shoal called Lubbers Bank which lies west from Lubbers Quarters off of the entrance to Hope Town, the only small island encountered so far without “cay” in its name. It seems that relatively deeper water has a green sea grass, the shallowest water only sand and Lubbers Bank is illuminated pale blue-white from the sun reflecting off its white sand bottom. It is to our port. At the end of the u-turn, Witch Point – rocky, jagged, coral limestone – is on our starboard. Sea grass is nine to ten feet beneath our keel. We fell off the wind after passing Witch Point to head more southerly to reach an anchorage at the junction of Tiloo Cay and Tiloo Bank. The total trip was 9.8 nautical miles.
Tiloo Cay is a long, skinny cay that runs north to south on the eastern edge of the Sea of Abaco with only a handful of houses scattered along its length. Ed and Nancy picked us up in their dinghy for a trip to the beach to walk their old, good hearted and stalwart crew dog, Scully. The beach picked clean of litter is backed by long-needled pine forest and in this grove are a variety of make-shift structures: an awning hung on a PVC pipe frame, numerous white and green plastic deck chairs, charcoal and gas grills and a Formica counter-top table that used a tree for one leg, two-by-fours for the others. We learned later that this was a beach claimed by local Bahamians on weekends, one of the few on the remaining public land in the Bahamas. On weekends it is packed. On Friday, only two hefty Americans, from the handful of anchored boats, slumped in chairs beneath the awning.
Back in the dinghy we agreed to take a look at a large landing craft moored a bit further south on Tiloo Cay off of what appeared to be a seaside motel. W asked a man wading in the shallows if it was alright to come ashore. He welcomed us and took us on a tour with a narrative running with big gaps that could only be fully connected by an inappropriate level of inquiry.
He and another fellow were developing the 28 acres to include cottages and a golf course. The other had been at it 20 years. Our narrator was invited by the other fellow, who was also his landlord where he had moored a houseboat in Jacksonville, to come for a weekend to Tiloo Cay five years ago. Our narrator stayed. He spoke of a family who shopped in Boston but wasn’t from Boston, and of picking up his daughter at Marsh Harbor Airport. He was in the Marines for six years, the Navy for eighteen.
The LST had been bought for $200,000 two years ago in San Diego as military surplus and he had sailed it to Tiloo Cay via the Panama Canal. The plan is to use it for marine services and they are awaiting a contract to haul cement block from the Dominican Republic. Others want to hire it, but won’t pay upfront which our narrator requires. The LST was likely used to support Navy Seals as it has a decompression chamber on board and a crane to lift on and off their mini subs. They had removed iron bricks of ballast now neatly stacked atop a cement wall on shore. One of its mooring lines goes ashore, around a tree to its anchor buried in the soil. The LST was sitting on its bottom at low tide. It doesn’t appear to have moved in a long time.
They had recently bought three Boston Whaler outboard boats for $30,000 through a GAO auction. The bulkheads in front of the shore building were made of carbon fiber, the floating docks, the only ones we have seen in the Bahamas, were made in France. A smaller landing craft was tied to one of them. A small power catamaran to another that he swore he was going to sink someday because of its low cabin overhead.
He told us what was evident from the vertical scar on his bare chest that he had had bi-pass surgery which was followed by a heart attack five days later which was followed by surgery to remove shrapnel from his leg, all within the last few years. His left bicep sported a square-rigged sail boat tattoo.
The only other person we saw was a black Bahamian driving a back-hoe then later breaking rocks out of the soil with a sledge hammer who was noted as being “one helluva gardener.” A sizeable area was planted in zoysia grass, portions of which were turning gray and dying and a specialist would be coming next week to tell them what to do. There were pilings sticking above the ground in the distance that will frame a shop to work on boats and other equipment.
He invited us to see the shore-side building that looks from the outside like a three unit motel with that many doors opening onto a covered deck. He was as unconcerned with our sandy beach shoes as he was with his as he led us through, offered the ladies a drink, which they declined. Soft rock music was playing. There were several seating rooms, indoor and outdoor kitchens with stainless appliances, only three bedrooms that we noticed, several filled wine racks, well-stocked liquor cabinets, cigar boxes, a handsome wood and tile floor, wicker furniture and numerous paintings and prints of women with little or nothing on. No one was about. One of us saw some clothes in a basket on the floor. The units were all interconnected and we asked if they could be closed off to which he responded: “they can do whatever they hell they want to.”
We thanked him, shook hands, said good bye as his cell phone rang and he walked out on the dock likely to get better reception, he waved and we walked away, not eavesdropping, but wondering. The four of us ate chili together that night on Troubadour.
Back to Snake Cay
Yesterday we sailed due west from Tiloo back to Snake Cay to anchor for a few hours. Ed and Nancy had not yet taken the dinghy tour in the shallow waters between Great Abaco Island and Deep Sea Cay. Saw a ray but not much else. In the afternoon we motored and sailed further south to an anchorage off Lynyard Cay, the last north-south lying cay at the southern end of the Sea of Abaco. M and I rowed the Zodiac to a small beach, turned her over for the second time in the Bahamas to scrub off accumulating life forms. It took about a half an hour to remove a month’s worth. That night the four of us ate pasta-primavera on Journey. Ed and Nancy paddled their dinghy the 100 yards or so from Troubadour to Journey as is was not worth the trouble for them to mount the outboard for such a short trip. They looked like Tom and Huck on a raft.
M. and I cleaned up and retired to the cockpit which still startles us that we do that. Our brains are too deeply imprinted with Maine conditions on anchor at night: mosquitoes, heavy dew, and chill. Nothing buzzed, the wind was still, the air warm, the temperature as right as a bed in the morning. The sea was quiet except for the remnants of Atlantic swell that squeezes between the cays to offer that eternal, gentle, sighing, lulling lift to the boat that we have come to cherish. Some twenty boats were orderly anchored close in the cay’s western shore, their anchor lights like a row of street lights descending down an avenue, their hulls distinct in the blue light of the nearly full moon. Clouds moving across the moon created images in M.’s mind of creatures that would give a fun scare to grandchildren. We slept well.
April 20, 2008
Little Harbor
This morning we rode the high tide into Little Harbor for a second visit, the first for Troubadour. The guide books note a reef off the entrance that in spite of swell proved good snorkeling this afternoon.
There were plenty of moorings in Little Harbor. We motored the dinghy this afternoon to a small reef at the Harbor’s entrance and snorkeled over a beautiful small reef. We ate dinner with Ed and Nancy at Pete’s Pub. The food was better this time. A fisherman landed at Pete’s dock with a 400 pound wahoo, a black streamlined fish, that he cut into steaks on the stern of his boat in front of a small audience. We’ve bought wahoo twice from the Hope Town fish market and cooked it on board. It is a white, firm swordfish like but more tender. We were told to marinate in “sour” which we learned met lemon or lime juice. It’s delicious.
Boats are on the move, north and south, and we continue to flip between that urge to set out and not wanting to let go of this special time and place, ambivalence that comes from choosing between two very good things.
We sailed with Nancy and Ed on Troubadour in light, variable winds, running west, jibing south, then heading up to go south east to make the required u-turn course around a shoal called Lubbers Bank which lies west from Lubbers Quarters off of the entrance to Hope Town, the only small island encountered so far without “cay” in its name. It seems that relatively deeper water has a green sea grass, the shallowest water only sand and Lubbers Bank is illuminated pale blue-white from the sun reflecting off its white sand bottom. It is to our port. At the end of the u-turn, Witch Point – rocky, jagged, coral limestone – is on our starboard. Sea grass is nine to ten feet beneath our keel. We fell off the wind after passing Witch Point to head more southerly to reach an anchorage at the junction of Tiloo Cay and Tiloo Bank. The total trip was 9.8 nautical miles.
Tiloo Cay is a long, skinny cay that runs north to south on the eastern edge of the Sea of Abaco with only a handful of houses scattered along its length. Ed and Nancy picked us up in their dinghy for a trip to the beach to walk their old, good hearted and stalwart crew dog, Scully. The beach picked clean of litter is backed by long-needled pine forest and in this grove are a variety of make-shift structures: an awning hung on a PVC pipe frame, numerous white and green plastic deck chairs, charcoal and gas grills and a Formica counter-top table that used a tree for one leg, two-by-fours for the others. We learned later that this was a beach claimed by local Bahamians on weekends, one of the few on the remaining public land in the Bahamas. On weekends it is packed. On Friday, only two hefty Americans, from the handful of anchored boats, slumped in chairs beneath the awning.
Back in the dinghy we agreed to take a look at a large landing craft moored a bit further south on Tiloo Cay off of what appeared to be a seaside motel. W asked a man wading in the shallows if it was alright to come ashore. He welcomed us and took us on a tour with a narrative running with big gaps that could only be fully connected by an inappropriate level of inquiry.
He and another fellow were developing the 28 acres to include cottages and a golf course. The other had been at it 20 years. Our narrator was invited by the other fellow, who was also his landlord where he had moored a houseboat in Jacksonville, to come for a weekend to Tiloo Cay five years ago. Our narrator stayed. He spoke of a family who shopped in Boston but wasn’t from Boston, and of picking up his daughter at Marsh Harbor Airport. He was in the Marines for six years, the Navy for eighteen.
The LST had been bought for $200,000 two years ago in San Diego as military surplus and he had sailed it to Tiloo Cay via the Panama Canal. The plan is to use it for marine services and they are awaiting a contract to haul cement block from the Dominican Republic. Others want to hire it, but won’t pay upfront which our narrator requires. The LST was likely used to support Navy Seals as it has a decompression chamber on board and a crane to lift on and off their mini subs. They had removed iron bricks of ballast now neatly stacked atop a cement wall on shore. One of its mooring lines goes ashore, around a tree to its anchor buried in the soil. The LST was sitting on its bottom at low tide. It doesn’t appear to have moved in a long time.
They had recently bought three Boston Whaler outboard boats for $30,000 through a GAO auction. The bulkheads in front of the shore building were made of carbon fiber, the floating docks, the only ones we have seen in the Bahamas, were made in France. A smaller landing craft was tied to one of them. A small power catamaran to another that he swore he was going to sink someday because of its low cabin overhead.
He told us what was evident from the vertical scar on his bare chest that he had had bi-pass surgery which was followed by a heart attack five days later which was followed by surgery to remove shrapnel from his leg, all within the last few years. His left bicep sported a square-rigged sail boat tattoo.
The only other person we saw was a black Bahamian driving a back-hoe then later breaking rocks out of the soil with a sledge hammer who was noted as being “one helluva gardener.” A sizeable area was planted in zoysia grass, portions of which were turning gray and dying and a specialist would be coming next week to tell them what to do. There were pilings sticking above the ground in the distance that will frame a shop to work on boats and other equipment.
He invited us to see the shore-side building that looks from the outside like a three unit motel with that many doors opening onto a covered deck. He was as unconcerned with our sandy beach shoes as he was with his as he led us through, offered the ladies a drink, which they declined. Soft rock music was playing. There were several seating rooms, indoor and outdoor kitchens with stainless appliances, only three bedrooms that we noticed, several filled wine racks, well-stocked liquor cabinets, cigar boxes, a handsome wood and tile floor, wicker furniture and numerous paintings and prints of women with little or nothing on. No one was about. One of us saw some clothes in a basket on the floor. The units were all interconnected and we asked if they could be closed off to which he responded: “they can do whatever they hell they want to.”
We thanked him, shook hands, said good bye as his cell phone rang and he walked out on the dock likely to get better reception, he waved and we walked away, not eavesdropping, but wondering. The four of us ate chili together that night on Troubadour.
Back to Snake Cay
Yesterday we sailed due west from Tiloo back to Snake Cay to anchor for a few hours. Ed and Nancy had not yet taken the dinghy tour in the shallow waters between Great Abaco Island and Deep Sea Cay. Saw a ray but not much else. In the afternoon we motored and sailed further south to an anchorage off Lynyard Cay, the last north-south lying cay at the southern end of the Sea of Abaco. M and I rowed the Zodiac to a small beach, turned her over for the second time in the Bahamas to scrub off accumulating life forms. It took about a half an hour to remove a month’s worth. That night the four of us ate pasta-primavera on Journey. Ed and Nancy paddled their dinghy the 100 yards or so from Troubadour to Journey as is was not worth the trouble for them to mount the outboard for such a short trip. They looked like Tom and Huck on a raft.
M. and I cleaned up and retired to the cockpit which still startles us that we do that. Our brains are too deeply imprinted with Maine conditions on anchor at night: mosquitoes, heavy dew, and chill. Nothing buzzed, the wind was still, the air warm, the temperature as right as a bed in the morning. The sea was quiet except for the remnants of Atlantic swell that squeezes between the cays to offer that eternal, gentle, sighing, lulling lift to the boat that we have come to cherish. Some twenty boats were orderly anchored close in the cay’s western shore, their anchor lights like a row of street lights descending down an avenue, their hulls distinct in the blue light of the nearly full moon. Clouds moving across the moon created images in M.’s mind of creatures that would give a fun scare to grandchildren. We slept well.
April 20, 2008
Little Harbor
This morning we rode the high tide into Little Harbor for a second visit, the first for Troubadour. The guide books note a reef off the entrance that in spite of swell proved good snorkeling this afternoon.
There were plenty of moorings in Little Harbor. We motored the dinghy this afternoon to a small reef at the Harbor’s entrance and snorkeled over a beautiful small reef. We ate dinner with Ed and Nancy at Pete’s Pub. The food was better this time. A fisherman landed at Pete’s dock with a 400 pound wahoo, a black streamlined fish, that he cut into steaks on the stern of his boat in front of a small audience. We’ve bought wahoo twice from the Hope Town fish market and cooked it on board. It is a white, firm swordfish like but more tender. We were told to marinate in “sour” which we learned met lemon or lime juice. It’s delicious.
Boats are on the move, north and south, and we continue to flip between that urge to set out and not wanting to let go of this special time and place, ambivalence that comes from choosing between two very good things.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Odds and ends
Our visit with Margaret and John last week was all too brief. We had time to celebrate our 30th anniversary of friendship, review children and grandchildren, talk about church and theology, lament the damage to America by the current administration, make three day-sails, walk the beach, snorkel a bit, and eat some good meals. We sailed with them from Marsh Harbor to Hope Town, Hope Town to Great Guana Cay and back, and then from Hope Town to Marsh Harbor from where they departed on an early plane so John in his role as selectman or the town of Shelburn, MA could present that night his planning committee’s work on zoning. Journey spent one night at Mangoes Marina where Ray, the dock master, once again tutored us in getting in and out of these tricky piling slips. This time when backing out we managed to squeeze the inflatable dinghy between Journey and a piling, turning it into a fender. No harm but more humiliation. Ray is so cool he doesn’t even smirk.
Cold Fronts
Patty, the 20-year primo volunteer, weather reader and spirit behind the Abaco Cruisers Net heard daily on VHF channel 68, predicts that the cold front that will pass over us this week will be our last. Patty said it’s the time of year when fronts weaken and trade winds begin to settle in out of the east to southeast. Winds will build to 25 to 30 out of the northeast today, some squalls are likely, and most surprisingly the coolest weather so far is forecast with a high of 71 on Wednesday and a low of 61. It’s the same front that brought a blizzard to M.’s mother in South Dakota last week. It also prompted Garrison Kielor on Prairie Home Companion to include in his monologue this weekend a gleeful bit about snowbirds driving home from Phoenix, getting caught in a blizzard just as they arrived back in Minnesota and having to feed carryout from a “Christian Chinese restaurant” to a bear out of hibernation disoriented by the April storm.
Weather is more important around here than weather. It is the prime rationalization for all of these nomads to drive themselves and gear at a snails pace from the white latitudes. It is warm, blue, puffy, easy, barefoot, shorts, sleep under sheets weather. You can get drunk on it. It will numb thoughts of work, homes, churches, family and friends left behind, until there’s an e-mail, a conversation, a news item that snaps you to sobering guilt for your binge of not minding the people and places and issues you deeply care about. Trips on the wagon are short. All it takes is a walk down a sand path bordered by bougainvillea to fall off into this time and place and moment and that’s a good thing at least for awhile.
Bottom Cleaning
The knot meter was showing half of the speed that the GPS was showing of speed over ground. It is a little paddle wheel at the end of cylinder that goes through a hole in the boat that you can pull out and clean. That didn’t solve the problem and we suspected marine growth around it on the hull could be the cause of it’s off reading.
We anchored in the Sea of Abaco off of Guana Cay for lunch with Margaret and John, dove off the boat, scrubbed round the knot meter and that fixed it, but noted that Journey’s bottom was turning into a reef. No barnacles, but plenty of plant life and what appeared to be little sea anemones that have soft brown tentacles growing in little round islands over most of the hull.
I had debated getting certified in scuba diving to do this job, but too much time and money for something I might do once. Also debated whether to hire someone until a conversation with Don, a physician on a Nonsuch near us, said why spend the money. “Snorkel on the boat, do it over a couple of days. It will be a great test of your cardiovascular health.” Don’s a psychiatrist.
On Friday and Saturday last week we anchored Journey outside of Hope Town Harbor and scrubbed the bottom. Some veteran cruisers had alerted us to heavy duty 3M scratch pads that are white, red and black marking three grades of coarseness. When you have to use black, they told us, you need to pull and reapply anti-fouling paint. We started with white and finished with red. It’s not fun. Buoyancy forces you to kick constantly, your head and back keep bumping against the hull, it’s disorienting to be on your back under water, scrubbing the part of the hull that dips in and under the boat. You get a lot of salt water in your mouth, and you have to retain enough air to clear the snorkel when you surface and you’re constantly fighting current. But Philipe and Jacque got a lot of exercise and satisfaction in getting the job done and saved a few bucks to boot. Our hearts are fine.
Other Duties
Other boat duties are part of each day. We live here so there are household chores of cleaning, cooking, and dishwashing, but all done compactly. The galley is about 20 square feet. The stove is two-burner, the refrigerator is about the size of an ice chest and as about as convenient to dig through to find the jar of olives as to find a quarter inch nut in a box of screws, nails and bolts. The head (bathroom) is three feet by three feet, including the toilet, sink and shower. The good thing is that every time you shower, the entire bathroom gets washed down and thus must get wiped down. We assiduously alternate who takes the last shower, because that’s whose turn it is to mop up.
It is hard to judge which is more fun, bottom cleaning or bilge cleaning. Bacteria love warmth and without attention you can quickly create a bog in the inch or so of bilge water that inevitably lies in the darkness and depths of the boat’s interior. When she rocks a belch of swamp gas rises. With the cabin sole boards up perhaps a gorilla could reach the bottom of the bilge. We, correct that, I lay flat on the floor, grip tongs that grip a sponge, spray in Simple Green, pour in a couple of gallons of fresh water, a quarter cup of bleach, wash it all around and pump it out. Clean as a spring breeze for about five days.
Garbage from the galley trash can is transferred to a larger plastic bag which is stored in the port cockpit locker to ferment, which it does rapidly in the heat. In Hope Town you can dinghy your garbage to a collection point on Monday, Wednesday and Friday between 8:30 and 9:30. You don’t forget to do it. Correction, I don’t forget to do it. On land or sea it seems to be my job and other guys’ jobs. Several times fellows have stopped by with their dinghies filled with trash bags and offering to take ours ashore for us. They kind of take my fun away.
We regularly check oil, fresh water intake to the engine, and battery status and have learned that it’s more efficient to run the battery capacity down 20 to 30 percent before recharging with the engine alternator. Metal and fiberglass are polished from time to time. The cockpit is the patio and shore dirt collection station and needs to be swept and sloshed out regularly.
We dust, vacuum and wipe down the salon every few days. It is our living room, dinning room, den and guest room in an area about eight by ten feet. Its floor area is only three by eight feet. Our daughter M. passed onto us several years ago a car vacuum that works like a charm and we can clean the salon well in about 15 minutes.
Laundry gets done at marinas where they charge $4 a load for washing, $4 to dry. Bahamian prices. We don’t have too much because you don’t need to wear too much, only a couple of loads a week unless we have guests.
I read another book about cruising from Nova Scotia to the Bahamas via the ICW who quotes a fellow living simply like we’ve self imposed on ourselves who says: “’ I’m rich…..I’ve got time and I’ve got choices. That’s what rich is.’” (Sailing Away from Winter, Silver Donald Cameron, p. 46.) Living lean we feel rich. Duties are light and quickly done and the rest of our days are spent taking life in deep breaths.
The other morning, an elderly man named Allen asked if he could join us on the overstuffed sofa and chairs at the coffee shop. He’s been coming to Hope Town since the 1960’s when there were “no phones, no electricity and none of the houses were painted.” His neighbors in Toledo were executives with Owens Illinois that was then harvesting pine on Great Abaco Island and asked him and his wife to join them on the company plane for a visit. He eventually bought property and has been coming ever since.
Allen’s house is not far from two new big houses perched on the dune for views of both the Sea of Abaco and the Atlantic and he told us that in one of them none of the windows opened. This is the international headquarters of fresh air. Allen says they build these places, rarely visit and in a few years sell them to make money and move on. They are nearly all Americans building these whopper-style houses, sealed off from the history, culture, and environment of the place.
Later that day we took our two-and-one-half mile road and beach walk and came upon a fly fisherman casting in the surf who was eager to show us his catch. He said the natives don’t know what it is and they don’t know what the other fish are that he catches. He showed us the barbells under its mouth, the curve of its jaw and speculated what it might be, a species from warmer climes moving in.
More about that cold front. Troubadour is moored next to us and we played Bananagrams with Ed and Nancy the night before us. When we dinghied the fifty yards back to Journey about 10 o’clock (April 15) it was blowing a gale and it blew hard all night. Ed told me when he stopped by to pick up my garbage (responsibility taken away yet once again) that he saw 38 knots in the middle of the night. Another fellow reported over 40. It’s going to diminish. We’ll leave Hope Town for a few days and sail south together and continue with our duties, listening, looking, talking, laughing, thinking, planning for the crossing back to the US and hopefully implanting some of the lessons of this journey into our souls.
Cold Fronts
Patty, the 20-year primo volunteer, weather reader and spirit behind the Abaco Cruisers Net heard daily on VHF channel 68, predicts that the cold front that will pass over us this week will be our last. Patty said it’s the time of year when fronts weaken and trade winds begin to settle in out of the east to southeast. Winds will build to 25 to 30 out of the northeast today, some squalls are likely, and most surprisingly the coolest weather so far is forecast with a high of 71 on Wednesday and a low of 61. It’s the same front that brought a blizzard to M.’s mother in South Dakota last week. It also prompted Garrison Kielor on Prairie Home Companion to include in his monologue this weekend a gleeful bit about snowbirds driving home from Phoenix, getting caught in a blizzard just as they arrived back in Minnesota and having to feed carryout from a “Christian Chinese restaurant” to a bear out of hibernation disoriented by the April storm.
Weather is more important around here than weather. It is the prime rationalization for all of these nomads to drive themselves and gear at a snails pace from the white latitudes. It is warm, blue, puffy, easy, barefoot, shorts, sleep under sheets weather. You can get drunk on it. It will numb thoughts of work, homes, churches, family and friends left behind, until there’s an e-mail, a conversation, a news item that snaps you to sobering guilt for your binge of not minding the people and places and issues you deeply care about. Trips on the wagon are short. All it takes is a walk down a sand path bordered by bougainvillea to fall off into this time and place and moment and that’s a good thing at least for awhile.
Bottom Cleaning
The knot meter was showing half of the speed that the GPS was showing of speed over ground. It is a little paddle wheel at the end of cylinder that goes through a hole in the boat that you can pull out and clean. That didn’t solve the problem and we suspected marine growth around it on the hull could be the cause of it’s off reading.
We anchored in the Sea of Abaco off of Guana Cay for lunch with Margaret and John, dove off the boat, scrubbed round the knot meter and that fixed it, but noted that Journey’s bottom was turning into a reef. No barnacles, but plenty of plant life and what appeared to be little sea anemones that have soft brown tentacles growing in little round islands over most of the hull.
I had debated getting certified in scuba diving to do this job, but too much time and money for something I might do once. Also debated whether to hire someone until a conversation with Don, a physician on a Nonsuch near us, said why spend the money. “Snorkel on the boat, do it over a couple of days. It will be a great test of your cardiovascular health.” Don’s a psychiatrist.
On Friday and Saturday last week we anchored Journey outside of Hope Town Harbor and scrubbed the bottom. Some veteran cruisers had alerted us to heavy duty 3M scratch pads that are white, red and black marking three grades of coarseness. When you have to use black, they told us, you need to pull and reapply anti-fouling paint. We started with white and finished with red. It’s not fun. Buoyancy forces you to kick constantly, your head and back keep bumping against the hull, it’s disorienting to be on your back under water, scrubbing the part of the hull that dips in and under the boat. You get a lot of salt water in your mouth, and you have to retain enough air to clear the snorkel when you surface and you’re constantly fighting current. But Philipe and Jacque got a lot of exercise and satisfaction in getting the job done and saved a few bucks to boot. Our hearts are fine.
Other Duties
Other boat duties are part of each day. We live here so there are household chores of cleaning, cooking, and dishwashing, but all done compactly. The galley is about 20 square feet. The stove is two-burner, the refrigerator is about the size of an ice chest and as about as convenient to dig through to find the jar of olives as to find a quarter inch nut in a box of screws, nails and bolts. The head (bathroom) is three feet by three feet, including the toilet, sink and shower. The good thing is that every time you shower, the entire bathroom gets washed down and thus must get wiped down. We assiduously alternate who takes the last shower, because that’s whose turn it is to mop up.
It is hard to judge which is more fun, bottom cleaning or bilge cleaning. Bacteria love warmth and without attention you can quickly create a bog in the inch or so of bilge water that inevitably lies in the darkness and depths of the boat’s interior. When she rocks a belch of swamp gas rises. With the cabin sole boards up perhaps a gorilla could reach the bottom of the bilge. We, correct that, I lay flat on the floor, grip tongs that grip a sponge, spray in Simple Green, pour in a couple of gallons of fresh water, a quarter cup of bleach, wash it all around and pump it out. Clean as a spring breeze for about five days.
Garbage from the galley trash can is transferred to a larger plastic bag which is stored in the port cockpit locker to ferment, which it does rapidly in the heat. In Hope Town you can dinghy your garbage to a collection point on Monday, Wednesday and Friday between 8:30 and 9:30. You don’t forget to do it. Correction, I don’t forget to do it. On land or sea it seems to be my job and other guys’ jobs. Several times fellows have stopped by with their dinghies filled with trash bags and offering to take ours ashore for us. They kind of take my fun away.
We regularly check oil, fresh water intake to the engine, and battery status and have learned that it’s more efficient to run the battery capacity down 20 to 30 percent before recharging with the engine alternator. Metal and fiberglass are polished from time to time. The cockpit is the patio and shore dirt collection station and needs to be swept and sloshed out regularly.
We dust, vacuum and wipe down the salon every few days. It is our living room, dinning room, den and guest room in an area about eight by ten feet. Its floor area is only three by eight feet. Our daughter M. passed onto us several years ago a car vacuum that works like a charm and we can clean the salon well in about 15 minutes.
Laundry gets done at marinas where they charge $4 a load for washing, $4 to dry. Bahamian prices. We don’t have too much because you don’t need to wear too much, only a couple of loads a week unless we have guests.
I read another book about cruising from Nova Scotia to the Bahamas via the ICW who quotes a fellow living simply like we’ve self imposed on ourselves who says: “’ I’m rich…..I’ve got time and I’ve got choices. That’s what rich is.’” (Sailing Away from Winter, Silver Donald Cameron, p. 46.) Living lean we feel rich. Duties are light and quickly done and the rest of our days are spent taking life in deep breaths.
The other morning, an elderly man named Allen asked if he could join us on the overstuffed sofa and chairs at the coffee shop. He’s been coming to Hope Town since the 1960’s when there were “no phones, no electricity and none of the houses were painted.” His neighbors in Toledo were executives with Owens Illinois that was then harvesting pine on Great Abaco Island and asked him and his wife to join them on the company plane for a visit. He eventually bought property and has been coming ever since.
Allen’s house is not far from two new big houses perched on the dune for views of both the Sea of Abaco and the Atlantic and he told us that in one of them none of the windows opened. This is the international headquarters of fresh air. Allen says they build these places, rarely visit and in a few years sell them to make money and move on. They are nearly all Americans building these whopper-style houses, sealed off from the history, culture, and environment of the place.
Later that day we took our two-and-one-half mile road and beach walk and came upon a fly fisherman casting in the surf who was eager to show us his catch. He said the natives don’t know what it is and they don’t know what the other fish are that he catches. He showed us the barbells under its mouth, the curve of its jaw and speculated what it might be, a species from warmer climes moving in.
More about that cold front. Troubadour is moored next to us and we played Bananagrams with Ed and Nancy the night before us. When we dinghied the fifty yards back to Journey about 10 o’clock (April 15) it was blowing a gale and it blew hard all night. Ed told me when he stopped by to pick up my garbage (responsibility taken away yet once again) that he saw 38 knots in the middle of the night. Another fellow reported over 40. It’s going to diminish. We’ll leave Hope Town for a few days and sail south together and continue with our duties, listening, looking, talking, laughing, thinking, planning for the crossing back to the US and hopefully implanting some of the lessons of this journey into our souls.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Easter and beyond
March 28, 2008
Hope Town is unfolding into a home town. Journey lies on the mooring we’ve rented for a month, far enough from the two bar/restaurants that party until midnight, but never any later than that. We’ve sampled three of five restaurants, are regulars at Hope Town Coffee that roasts its own beans that yield flavors that put Starbucks to shame. We have discovered walks for many moods, including a two mile or so beach walk that offers firm sand close to the surf line with just enough give to make walking delightful
St. James Methodist Church – rectangular, white stucco, low roofed, small steeple topped by a cross – perches on the sand dune that rises from Back Street. We enjoy its electric, but good quality carillon that offers familiar hymns over the harbor at noon and six each day. The other church building in the settlement is a Church of God that seems in good repair but inactive, and Catholics celebrate mass in a tiny park near the post office dock, standing or using the few benches arranged as pews. An itinerant priest celebrated mass mid-afternoon the first Sunday we were here.
Susan and Dennis, our friends from Minneapolis, who spent a week with us on Journey, M. and I opted for the six a.m. Easter sunrise service at St. James with some trepidation. A couple of Sundays ago, a glimpse through the side windows before the start of the nine-thirty family service revealed a teenage boy preparing an electric drum set. We decided to celebrate God’s generosity outside of the community that day.
It poured rain and blew hard Easter eve as we set alarms for the first time since rising early for crossing the Gulf Stream. It was warm, cloudy, dark, wet and still when we putted ashore, climbed the ladder on the dock and walked the short block-and-a-half from the government pier to the church and entered as the organ began playing “Christ Our Lord Has Risen Today.”
A slender, elderly man wearing the only tie in the sanctuary presided with an opening prayer, followed by Hymns and a beautiful reading by an Englishman of the King James’s version of John’s telling of Mary Magdalene visiting the tomb. Before the offering the congregation was asked to introduce ourselves and perhaps two thirds of the 25 or so attending were visitors. We were invited for refreshments served on the patio that lies directly behind the altar on the East side of the building overlooking the Atlantic.
The sermon was the good news of the resurrection and its promise of eternal life – a traditional, literal, and deeply felt message – from the preacher, Vernon, whom we later learned was a layman and whose wife was seriously ill and had taken a turn for the worse on Saturday.
We sang the closing hymn, but the organist seemed to keep missing several phrases. It became clear why Vernon kept going over to the organ before each hymn and leaning over it. We thought he was talking to the organist. Not so, he was turning on and off the digital recording that played the traditional hymns so beautifully, except missed a byte or two during the last.
He had said earlier, that St. James services always offer surprises, but when its quirks become frustrating, he is calmed by a fellow parishioner who says: “but we function.” They certainly do in warmth and hospitality. We gathered after the service on their patio, on the top of the dune, on the east side of the church and watched dawn break and broke our fast with cakes, brownies, muffins, coffee and deviled eggs, the likes of which I haven’t had since a church picnic in New Jersey thirty years ago.
M. and I returned to St. James the next Sunday to attend its 11:00 o’clock service and there witnessed the struggle we all face to understand and reach across our diversity. The layman, Vernon, who presided at Easter Sunrise greeted us and the rest of the congregation of all white, mostly elderly, winter and full time residents of the Cay well-dressed in summer casual, who nodded, smiled and said good morning when eyes met. A choir of eight voices that for all appearances you would think would be a bit croaky, was surprisingly good. The organist, a dedicated volunteer commuted each Sunday from nearby Man-O-War Cay, played her last service as she, like several others, would soon be returning to Canada or the United States.
I looked around for a clergyman and wondered if Vernon would again preside, when from the nave, a large black man in a black suit and shirt and white clerical collar processed. We had heard that St. James had recently installed a new pastor.
A disconnect was evident from the outset. His English was strongly accented by his native language, Haitian Creole. His accent combined with hearing loss among most of us made much of what he said hard to follow. He announced the first hymn, the choir director gently noted the choir would sing first. He announced the Psalm, but it was unclear what the order of response should be. Two verses of struggle and he suggested that one side should read one verse, the other side the other, but it never quite worked, and his Psalter seemed to be a different version than the Psalter in the Methodist Hymnal. There was some confusion about who would be reading what lesson. He seemed to be knocked off his game. His warm open face invited response and the congregation gave very little.
He warmed in his sermon, was easier to understand and allowed us all the doubt of Thomas and the hope of “I believe, help my unbelief.” A good Easter message, the closing hymn, benediction, and then the comment from a parishioner to us on the way out that some of the “older” people were having difficulty understanding him.
Vernon, the lay leader at St. James, runs Vernon’s Grocery and we got to chatting with him a week later. The new pastor serves three congregations, two of them on Great Abaco and predominately black. He is on trial until the fall and parishioners are struggling most of all with the language. He is a warm and good man, but, Vernon said, his greatest challenge will be with the black churches. “Black Bahamians don’t think Haitians are very smart.”
What hope is there for us to reach across cultures, conventions and biases that close us to one another? Is not that what Easter is? St. James’s story will need to unfold.
Susan and Dennis left last Sunday. It was a great week. We anchored one night off of Lynyard Cay, south of here a few miles. There was too much surge at the reef nearby to snorkel. Another day we did a day sail from Hope Town to Great Guana Cay, anchored for lunch and returned, bracketing high tide by two and a half hours on either side. The entrance to Hope Town Harbor has five feet at normal low, and we think we now have a five hour window to get in and out.
Our week was also filled with story telling and marathon games of Bananagrams and Shanghai Rummy and enjoying Dennis’s wit, for example, an exchange as he was rummaging through his duffle bag on the pilot berth:
Susan: “What are you looking for?
Dennis: “If I told you every time I was looking for something, I’d be talking non stop!”
Ed and Nancy on Troubadour came into Hopetown and joined us for dinner at the Abaco Inn to celebrate our 44th anniversary on March 29th. The Inn sends a van to Hope Town to drive guests to its perch on a dune on the southern end of the Elbow Cay Island where big surf comes into the beach. It is a spectacular view and sound to accompany dinner with these good new friends.
April 6, 2008
Last Wednesday, Ed and Nancy crewed with us on Journey as she entered her first race. The Hope Town Sailing Club holds cruisers races, invites all, handicaps the boats for their sluggishness and all the stuff they carry and has a party after the race. We headed out, monitored the assigned VHF channel, the wind increased and stayed steady at about 20 Knots, the cut off point for racing. It was cancelled, so we sailed a couple of hours north, dropped the hook, had lunch and returned, tacking a good deal, and realized how incredibly much work racing would be for folks of our ilk. Ed is a good sailor and continued Charlie P’s lessons begun last summer in Nova Scotia on sail trim.
Linda and Don, fellow boaters, are spending their seventh winter in Hope Town and Don invited me to a weekly writer’s workshop held at the sailing club that I sat in on last Thursday. Perhaps 20 people were there, mostly women, and none of us kids. I was the only newcomer, and the convener, Mary, had people introduce themselves: professional writers, retired lawyer, cruisers, an artist, people who make Hope Town their winter quarters, people who have time to work at writing.
We sat in a circle, shuttered windows opened around us to let the soft tropical air into the room, and those who wished offered their work to invite criticism, all of it gentle and positive. The works weren’t completed assignments, they were the personal, often heart felt efforts to capture something memorable, important, whether travelogue, poem, memoir, essay. It was like a fellowship on steroids. Good souls reading a memoir of sailing adventure long ago with a now deceased spouse, a passionate critique of a child’s home schooling curriculum, and an extraordinary essay of a recollection of a friendship of two elderly women from diverse cultures and upbringings that began on bedpans when they were roommates in a rehab hospital. I hope to go back.
Today, we are once again laced into a berth at Mangoes Marina in Marsh Harbor getting our batteries charged, water tanks filled, clothes washed, larder loaded and awaiting the arrival this afternoon of John and Margaret who will spend four days with us. We’ll sail back to Hope Town this afternoon to be on the cooler mooring and in the beauty of that harbor for sunset and the lighting of the light.
Hope Town is unfolding into a home town. Journey lies on the mooring we’ve rented for a month, far enough from the two bar/restaurants that party until midnight, but never any later than that. We’ve sampled three of five restaurants, are regulars at Hope Town Coffee that roasts its own beans that yield flavors that put Starbucks to shame. We have discovered walks for many moods, including a two mile or so beach walk that offers firm sand close to the surf line with just enough give to make walking delightful
St. James Methodist Church – rectangular, white stucco, low roofed, small steeple topped by a cross – perches on the sand dune that rises from Back Street. We enjoy its electric, but good quality carillon that offers familiar hymns over the harbor at noon and six each day. The other church building in the settlement is a Church of God that seems in good repair but inactive, and Catholics celebrate mass in a tiny park near the post office dock, standing or using the few benches arranged as pews. An itinerant priest celebrated mass mid-afternoon the first Sunday we were here.
Susan and Dennis, our friends from Minneapolis, who spent a week with us on Journey, M. and I opted for the six a.m. Easter sunrise service at St. James with some trepidation. A couple of Sundays ago, a glimpse through the side windows before the start of the nine-thirty family service revealed a teenage boy preparing an electric drum set. We decided to celebrate God’s generosity outside of the community that day.
It poured rain and blew hard Easter eve as we set alarms for the first time since rising early for crossing the Gulf Stream. It was warm, cloudy, dark, wet and still when we putted ashore, climbed the ladder on the dock and walked the short block-and-a-half from the government pier to the church and entered as the organ began playing “Christ Our Lord Has Risen Today.”
A slender, elderly man wearing the only tie in the sanctuary presided with an opening prayer, followed by Hymns and a beautiful reading by an Englishman of the King James’s version of John’s telling of Mary Magdalene visiting the tomb. Before the offering the congregation was asked to introduce ourselves and perhaps two thirds of the 25 or so attending were visitors. We were invited for refreshments served on the patio that lies directly behind the altar on the East side of the building overlooking the Atlantic.
The sermon was the good news of the resurrection and its promise of eternal life – a traditional, literal, and deeply felt message – from the preacher, Vernon, whom we later learned was a layman and whose wife was seriously ill and had taken a turn for the worse on Saturday.
We sang the closing hymn, but the organist seemed to keep missing several phrases. It became clear why Vernon kept going over to the organ before each hymn and leaning over it. We thought he was talking to the organist. Not so, he was turning on and off the digital recording that played the traditional hymns so beautifully, except missed a byte or two during the last.
He had said earlier, that St. James services always offer surprises, but when its quirks become frustrating, he is calmed by a fellow parishioner who says: “but we function.” They certainly do in warmth and hospitality. We gathered after the service on their patio, on the top of the dune, on the east side of the church and watched dawn break and broke our fast with cakes, brownies, muffins, coffee and deviled eggs, the likes of which I haven’t had since a church picnic in New Jersey thirty years ago.
M. and I returned to St. James the next Sunday to attend its 11:00 o’clock service and there witnessed the struggle we all face to understand and reach across our diversity. The layman, Vernon, who presided at Easter Sunrise greeted us and the rest of the congregation of all white, mostly elderly, winter and full time residents of the Cay well-dressed in summer casual, who nodded, smiled and said good morning when eyes met. A choir of eight voices that for all appearances you would think would be a bit croaky, was surprisingly good. The organist, a dedicated volunteer commuted each Sunday from nearby Man-O-War Cay, played her last service as she, like several others, would soon be returning to Canada or the United States.
I looked around for a clergyman and wondered if Vernon would again preside, when from the nave, a large black man in a black suit and shirt and white clerical collar processed. We had heard that St. James had recently installed a new pastor.
A disconnect was evident from the outset. His English was strongly accented by his native language, Haitian Creole. His accent combined with hearing loss among most of us made much of what he said hard to follow. He announced the first hymn, the choir director gently noted the choir would sing first. He announced the Psalm, but it was unclear what the order of response should be. Two verses of struggle and he suggested that one side should read one verse, the other side the other, but it never quite worked, and his Psalter seemed to be a different version than the Psalter in the Methodist Hymnal. There was some confusion about who would be reading what lesson. He seemed to be knocked off his game. His warm open face invited response and the congregation gave very little.
He warmed in his sermon, was easier to understand and allowed us all the doubt of Thomas and the hope of “I believe, help my unbelief.” A good Easter message, the closing hymn, benediction, and then the comment from a parishioner to us on the way out that some of the “older” people were having difficulty understanding him.
Vernon, the lay leader at St. James, runs Vernon’s Grocery and we got to chatting with him a week later. The new pastor serves three congregations, two of them on Great Abaco and predominately black. He is on trial until the fall and parishioners are struggling most of all with the language. He is a warm and good man, but, Vernon said, his greatest challenge will be with the black churches. “Black Bahamians don’t think Haitians are very smart.”
What hope is there for us to reach across cultures, conventions and biases that close us to one another? Is not that what Easter is? St. James’s story will need to unfold.
Susan and Dennis left last Sunday. It was a great week. We anchored one night off of Lynyard Cay, south of here a few miles. There was too much surge at the reef nearby to snorkel. Another day we did a day sail from Hope Town to Great Guana Cay, anchored for lunch and returned, bracketing high tide by two and a half hours on either side. The entrance to Hope Town Harbor has five feet at normal low, and we think we now have a five hour window to get in and out.
Our week was also filled with story telling and marathon games of Bananagrams and Shanghai Rummy and enjoying Dennis’s wit, for example, an exchange as he was rummaging through his duffle bag on the pilot berth:
Susan: “What are you looking for?
Dennis: “If I told you every time I was looking for something, I’d be talking non stop!”
Ed and Nancy on Troubadour came into Hopetown and joined us for dinner at the Abaco Inn to celebrate our 44th anniversary on March 29th. The Inn sends a van to Hope Town to drive guests to its perch on a dune on the southern end of the Elbow Cay Island where big surf comes into the beach. It is a spectacular view and sound to accompany dinner with these good new friends.
April 6, 2008
Last Wednesday, Ed and Nancy crewed with us on Journey as she entered her first race. The Hope Town Sailing Club holds cruisers races, invites all, handicaps the boats for their sluggishness and all the stuff they carry and has a party after the race. We headed out, monitored the assigned VHF channel, the wind increased and stayed steady at about 20 Knots, the cut off point for racing. It was cancelled, so we sailed a couple of hours north, dropped the hook, had lunch and returned, tacking a good deal, and realized how incredibly much work racing would be for folks of our ilk. Ed is a good sailor and continued Charlie P’s lessons begun last summer in Nova Scotia on sail trim.
Linda and Don, fellow boaters, are spending their seventh winter in Hope Town and Don invited me to a weekly writer’s workshop held at the sailing club that I sat in on last Thursday. Perhaps 20 people were there, mostly women, and none of us kids. I was the only newcomer, and the convener, Mary, had people introduce themselves: professional writers, retired lawyer, cruisers, an artist, people who make Hope Town their winter quarters, people who have time to work at writing.
We sat in a circle, shuttered windows opened around us to let the soft tropical air into the room, and those who wished offered their work to invite criticism, all of it gentle and positive. The works weren’t completed assignments, they were the personal, often heart felt efforts to capture something memorable, important, whether travelogue, poem, memoir, essay. It was like a fellowship on steroids. Good souls reading a memoir of sailing adventure long ago with a now deceased spouse, a passionate critique of a child’s home schooling curriculum, and an extraordinary essay of a recollection of a friendship of two elderly women from diverse cultures and upbringings that began on bedpans when they were roommates in a rehab hospital. I hope to go back.
Today, we are once again laced into a berth at Mangoes Marina in Marsh Harbor getting our batteries charged, water tanks filled, clothes washed, larder loaded and awaiting the arrival this afternoon of John and Margaret who will spend four days with us. We’ll sail back to Hope Town this afternoon to be on the cooler mooring and in the beauty of that harbor for sunset and the lighting of the light.
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