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.