January 2009

My friend Kathy was scheduled to fly out of Staniel Cay at 8:45 am on New Year’s Day.

Back home this would have been a simple matter. Arrive at the airport two hours before your flight. Be sure to get a ride or take a cab because the parking costs more than the flight. Bring your bags and three pieces of ID to the airline counter. While the clerk runs your full background check on his/her computer, write a short biography and tie it to your bags. Place them on the scale and say a prayer to your deity of choice hoping that you will see your bags again someday. Once your tickets are issued proceed to security. Take half of your clothes off, put them in a basket with your carry on, and send them through the x-ray. Step through the metal detector. Spread your arms and legs while the security officer touches you in some really interesting places with his/her wand. Explain the contents of your carry on to the x-ray technician. Put half your clothes back on again. Proceed to the gate. Sit reading a book for an hour and a half wondering why the heck you were told to be there two hours before your flight.

Life is a little different in the Bahamas. We boarded the dinghy at 8:15 am and beached at the boat ramp. Then we grabbed Kathy’s bags and walked across the street to the airport. There wasn’t a soul to be seen, just two rows of small parked aeroplanes and an open air Tiki hut for a waiting room. At 8:45 am, there was no plane. No surprise there, we’re on island time. Around 9:30, a couple of golf carts arrived and a plane landed. We asked the people in the golf carts. It wasn’t her plane. Besides, if it landed now, it would be early! An hour or so later, more golf carts arrived followed by another plane. This one was from the competing airline. More jokes were cracked about it still being early. The representative from the competing airline said she would make some phone calls to look into it for us and whizzed away in her golf cart. She was back a half hour later. The flight had been cancelled. Kathy was to take the 2 pm flight. No one had been sent to inform us. No provision was made for her connecting flight to New York. We had lunch at the Staniel Cay Yacht Club and returned to the airport for 1:30 pm. At 2:30 pm the plane finally arrived. Kathy asked the pilot if this was the correct flight. He said yes and took her bags. There weren’t even any tickets to be shown. He was told to pick up one passenger. She looked like one passenger, so life was good. Kathy gave me one last hug goodbye and climbed in. The plane taxied to the far end of the runway, then roared past me and into the sky. I was a singlehander again.

The next day dawned grey and rainy. In the afternoon, I went looking for my friends Jacob and Jim from Toronto. I found them scavenging a wrecked sailboat on the rocks on the east side of the island of Big Major’s Spot. The wreck was a horribly sad place. Here was someone’s dream shattered on the rocks. She had been there long enough that the rocks had eaten away most of her port side and everything that could easily be salvaged was gone. She was once a grand lady, fitted out with the best that the 1980's could provide. Her later years had been rough, some of her standing rigging had been replaced with galvanized wire, other rigging was repaired with cable clamps. I helped Jacob and Jim salvage 200 feet of anchor line and 80 feet of chain. It was a nice find and it just would have ended up on the bottom when the boat completely broke up. Still, it felt like stealing jewellery off of a corpse.

My friends Dan and Kathy on Sea Star were just north of me at Warderick Wells in the Exuma Land and Sea Park so I sailed north to join them. I arrived in the very tight, crescent shaped, mooring field with a very strong current in the middle of a squall, only to be hailed on the VHF by the warden’s very perturbed wife. It seems I was supposed to reserve a mooring 24 hours in advance. My penance was to roll around on one of the outer moorings for big yachts while she rearranged the boats in the mooring field and found me a spot.  Thanks Judy!

The Exuma Land and Sea Park, headquartered at Warderick Wells, was established in 1958 to provide a breeding refuge for commercial marine life such as lobster, conch, and grouper. The park consists of 176 square miles including 15 cays where the banks meet Exuma Sound. The success of the park becomes remarkably apparent when you snorkel the local reefs. The coral is the most intact I have seen anywhere in the Bahamas and the other marine life is correspondingly abundant. The heavily hunted grouper and lobster take almost no notice when you approach. Outside the park they swim for their lives!

We spent two days snorkelling the reefs and hiking the trails. On the second day I hiked all the way down the island to the ruins of the Davis plantation. In 1780, the Davis’ were among the first loyalists to arrive in the Exumas fleeing the American Revolution. They found the island covered in large hardwoods such as madeira, lignum vitae, and braziletto, and having many natural fresh water wells for which the island was named. Like most Loyalists in the Exumas, they brought with them their slaves and hoped to re-establish the cotton plantation lifestyle they had lead in the United States. They had their slaves cut the forest and gather stones from the rocky soil to build several buildings and a wall that ran all the way across the island from west to east. Most loyalist plantations met their end due to chenille caterpillars, soil depletion, and the abolition of slavery. Legend has it that the Davises had a far more dramatic end. The southern anchorage at Warderick Wells was the perfect location for pirates waiting to ambush ships passing through the Wide Opening on their way to and from Nassau. The golden age of piracy in the Bahamas had ended by 1730. The perfection of Warderick Well’s southern anchorage lived on. The few straggling pirates that continued to use the southern anchorage were not pleased with the new arrivals on the island and promptly massacred them.

The sun set as I was walking back to the boat and I was soon greeted by the islands new inhabitants. Hutia (who-tia), small guinea pig like rodents, are the only endemic land mammal in the Bahamas. Hunting pressure from humans, dogs, and cats reduced their numbers to the point that they only existed on one small cay. In 1973, eleven hutia were released on Little Wax Cay and in 1981, thirteen were released on Warderick Wells. The introduction program was a little too successful, and these two islands are now in the ironic position of being overrun with an endangered species! As I walked down the trail in the twilight, I was continually greeted by rustling in the bushes and balls of fur streaking across my path.

Our next stop was Cambridge Cay at the southern end of the park. Cambridge Cay has a mooring field along with ample anchoring room and great holding bottom. There was a free mooring behind a vessel crewed by three young bikini clad women. For some reason I had the hardest time picking up the mooring! No sooner was Windsong secured, than the bikini girls dropped their mooring and sailed away. Feeling more than a little ripped off, I joined Dan and Kathy for a hike across the island to Bell Rock where we spotted a peregrine falcon.

We stayed at Cambridge Cay for four days weathering a cold front, repairing my masthead light, and snorkelling. Feature reefs included the Sea Aquarium where we saw several lionfish, a huge grouper, and a nurse shark. Another was the Airplane Reef which consisted of an upside down Cessna that crashed in the 1980's while running drugs, and several coral heads also populated by lionfish. While beautiful, lionfish are becoming a huge problem in the Bahamas. It is believed that they escaped from a Florida aquarium in or around the year 2000.  Native to the Pacific and Indian Oceans, they have no natural predators and can kill 20 native fish in 30 minutes. Tom’s Elkhorn Reef was a favourite with its bright yellow Elkhorn coral, the healthiest I’ve seen in the Bahamas. Rocky Dundas was a unique site with two swim-in caves that were sacred sites to the Lucayans who inhabited the islands at the time of Columbus. The caves were beautifully lit by skylights in their roofs and draped with stalactites that formed 15,000 years ago when sea level was 300 feet lower than it is today.

On two evenings, the cruisers met on a small sandy islet to watch the sunset. It was there that I met Kelly, the daughter of the mooring hosts Rick and Eliena aboard the catamaran Movin’ On. Not only was she astoundingly gorgeous, she was a woman after my own heart. She was a vegetarian, a skier, a sailor, and loved to travel. She had quit her job teaching grade school music to spend a year travelling. She had spent most of her year in Mexico teaching English. We went for a hike to Honeymoon Beach and she was absolutely mortified of at the thought of stepping on a snail and killing it. Unfortunately, she had a boyfriend in Mexico and an estranged husband in the States.

It was with a heavy heart that I said goodbye to Kelly and sailed back to Staniel Cay. At Staniel we did some re-provisioning, had a cruisers dinner at Club Thunderball, and I took Kelly’s advice and visited Piggy Beach. The pigs are domestic pigs that were placed on the island of Big Major’s Spot by a couple of Staniel Cay residents. I had heard that pigs can be vicious so I approached with caution. I found them hungrily eating something at one end of the beach. There were at least three large pink adults and three brown piglets with black spots. They seemed interested in little apart from their food, so I landed at the far end of the beach and explored an old wooden wreck. I saw a local boat approaching the pigs. Figuring that these folks would know what to do with the pigs, I jumped back in the dinghy and puttered over. The locals anchored their boat a short distance offshore and began throwing hotdogs to the pigs. I cut the engine and drifted in, until the skeg of the motor caught in the sand, holding me what I thought was a safe distance from the beach. Suddenly, two of the cannibalistic pigs were charging right toward me. I yanked madly at the ripcord. The engine to roared to life just as the pigs crashed into the water. I gunned the throttle only to find myself too hopelessly around to move. I frantically tilted the engine up as they splashed toward me and made my narrow escape. The pigs swam right out to the local boat and ate hotdogs and bread right out of their hands.

Next we headed for Black Point to do some laundry and eat at Lorraine’s Café. We ended up staying there for a week. Black Point is the largest settlement in the northern and central Bahamas. It is an extremely religious community that relies on farming, fishing, and weaving. The favourite cruiser’s hangout in town is Lorraine’s Café, a restaurant and internet café with an honour system bar. We first heard about Lorraine’s legendary hospitality way back in the Abacos. We spent our time fixing our boats, snorkelling, using the dinghies to play in the four foot standing waves produced by the tide rip at Dotham cut, and visiting Little Creek where Evan’s Cottman, the Out Island Doctor, weathered a gale. We met several cruisers from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia and spent hours reliving out adventures in the out ports during the summer.

On January 18^th, I sailed right off of my anchor at Black Point and beat my way to Little Farmer’s Cay. There we visited another famous Exuma cruiser’s hangout: Terry Bain’s Ocean Cabin. Terry was true to his reputation as a host, philosopher, and world traveller. We spent hours with him discussing his vision of participatory democracy.

Across from Little Farmer’s on Great Guana Cay was Blue Sky, a rusty old Great Lakes Turtleback fishing boat abandoned on the beach. She had been fitted out for cruising and steamed thousands of miles to meet her sorry end, thrown up on the beach by a storm. Another shattered dream. I beached the dinghy next to her and went for a long walk down the beach looking for a 90 foot cave that was mentioned in Steve Pavlidis’ Exuma Guide. I found lots of adventure, lots of brush to scratch my legs on, and a pipe to extend the tiller on the dinghy engine, but no cave.

During our third and final night at Little Farmer’s the wind piped up to 20 knots and by 1:30 am Windsong was bouncing up and down so much that I couldn’t sleep. At 2 am I was startled by the loud sound of chain rattling out. I stumbled out into my heaving cockpit to find the large catamaran behind me lit up like a Christmas tree doing an anchor drill. Thank goodness they were behind me. She could have crushed Windsong like a margarine container. By 4:30 am, either things had calmed down a bit, or I was too exhausted to care, and I fell back asleep.

The next morning the only thing that convinced me to depart for Lee Stocking Island was the prospect of spending the day bouncing around in the anchorage at Little Farmer’s. It turned out to be a glorious sail reaching at 6-7 knots. I sailed right through the Adderly Cut and right on through the mooring field, dousing the genny only to drop my anchor. That night I met John and Jill aboard Cataline. Their previous boat will be familiar to many Windsor sailors. She was Elaine Maine’s catamaran Madeline. Elaine was a Windsor doctor who sailed Madeline around the world with her husband and recorded their adventures in her book Sailing Promise.

I also met Gerald, a singlehander from France. He crossed the Atlantic ten years ago with a partner. They set two genoas wing on wing and didn’t touch a sheet for their entire 14 day run from Cape Verde. His crew signed on only for the passage so he has been singlehanding around the Bahamas and the Caribbean ever since.

Lee Stocking Island is home to NOAA’s Caribbean Marine Research Centre. The centre’s outreach coordinator organized a tour of the station for the visiting cruisers. We were able to view the large ponds, aquaria, laboratories, and huge desalination plant. The facilities were mostly vacant since most research is done during the summer.

Now it was time to test our shallow water sailing abilities. Even in her totally overloaded state, Windsong only draws 4½ feet of water. The 44 foot, 20 ton Sea Star draws only five feet. Windsong lead as we threaded our way along the shoal draft route to Barretarre. With the tide still rising, the two boats slipped over a 1.2m (4 foot) mean low water (MLW) sounding to where Sea Star dropped her anchor in front of the government dock. Windsong continued over a 1m (3'4") MLW sounding. The lowest number on the depth sounder was 4.3 feet but Windsong glided through without the slightest bump and dropped her anchor of off Little Hog Cay. The only other boats there were catamarans.

Barretarre had been recommended by Gerald, the French singlehander due to its unique grocery shopping experience. We dinghied ashore and headed for RayAnn’s variety. The store was tiny but had a produce section that cannot be parallelled. There were virtually no vegetables in the store. We spoke to RayAnn about the vegetables we were looking for and she lead us out into the gardens. She introduced us to her father who was working the fields then pointed out the best tomatoes, peppers, and squash for us to pick.

Loaded with the world’s freshest vegetables, we stopped by the Circle T bar for a drink. Here we learned that Ponce de Leon was looking in the wrong place for the Fountain of Youth. The 64 year old bar tender didn’t look a day over 40. RayAnn’s father, he told us was in his 80's. I would have put him in his early 60's. The last two people to die in town were 102 and 103!

I awoke the next morning to find all of the other boats in the anchorage gone. Unable to get any shelter from Little Hog Cay, Sea Star had a rough night and decided to take advantage of the early morning high tide. I don’t know what made the catamarans such morning people but I decided to take the hint and get out before the falling tide trapped me. I met up with Sea Star for breakfast behind Children’s Bay Cay.

Over breakfast we weighed our options. Beans came in after a broad reach from Georgetown. I recognized the name of the boat from the time I spent in the Bahamas with my parents ten years ago. I hailed them and they remembered Mom, Dad, and Dana. They also said that they had just had the worst run they had ever had in 12 years in the Bahamas. Dan, Kathy, and I couldn’t figure out why. Boats close reaching past in the other direction seem to be wearing a lot of sail. We decided to go for it. It was blowing a fairly steady 20 knots and Windsong struggled to keep her rail out of the water with a full genoa. It would have been more comfortable with a reef but I was cracking on as hard as I could averaging 6.3 knots. I hated to see Sea Star steadily pulling away from me even though I knew she had 50% more waterline. To add insult to injury, a catamaran slowly pulled past me. Dan swears she was motor sailing. Sixteen miles later I bore off into the Conch Cay Cut. Windsong stood up, raced to 7 knots, and blew past the cat and a centre cockpit sloop. There was no catching Sea Star. Once in the sheltered waters of Elizabeth Harbour the sailing was easy allowing me to sail right up to the anchorage at Monument Beach. I worked my way through all of the anchored boats and snuggled up to the beach where I dropped my hook next to a 42 foot silver catamaran also named Windsong.

Georgetown is the Bahamian cruiser’s Mecca. The eight mile long Elizabeth Harbour has dozens of anchorages and most winters hosts a fleet of about 400 cruising boats. Most of the boats line the beaches of Stocking Island. There are five beach anchorages from north to south: Hamburger Beach, Monument Beach, Honeymoon Beach, Volleyball Beach, and Sand Dollar. Hamburger Beach, no surprise, is home to a hamburger stand run by the Peace and Plenty Hotel and is the location for most cruiser seminars. Monument Beach is located below the monument, a concrete navigational beacon at the highest point on the island, a 120 foot hill. At Honeymoon Beach it appears that the honeymoon is over because it is home to three derelict abandoned vessels. It is also the location where cruisers gather to swim. Volleyball Beach is the social hub of the cruising community. There are three beach volleyball courts and the Chat and Chill bar and grill. Volleyball beach is also the entrance to the four Hurricane holes creatively named Holes 0-3 starting from south to north. The holes are home to vessels who have been spending the entire winter in Georgetown for a decade or more. Moorings are even available for year round storage in Holes 2 and 3. At night, the number of anchor lights along Stocking Island rivals the number of lights across the harbour in Georgetown itself.

On the other side of the harbour along Great Exuma Island you will find the secret anchorage with free internet that the other Windsong filled me in on, Georgetown proper, and Red Shanks. Red Shanks is a series of anchorages with shelter rivalling The Holes. It is the quiet far side of town because a bridge construction project has blocked the dinghy route into Georgetown for supplies. Georgetown can be approached by either anchoring your boat in Kidd Cove or taking a sometimes wet dinghy ride across the harbour. To get ashore you take your dinghy through a narrow canal under a bridge into Lake Victoria. The canal is so narrow that only one dingy can pass at a time and outgoing dinghies are asked to yield to incoming vessels. Lake Victoria, unlike its African namesake is very small and only has enough depth for dinghies. Here you will find a large dinghy dock with free reverse osmosis water provided by the Exuma Markets grocery store where you can buy just about any food a cruiser could dream of. The town has a decent hardware store, propane fills, gas station, internet cafes, a vet, a doctor, and just about everything else a cruiser needs.

Days in Georgetown start with the 8:10am Cruiser’s Net on VHF channel 72. The net covers weather, news, local business announcements, and cruisers activities. Cruisers then switch to channel 68 for general calling. There are so many boats in the harbour that the use of channel 16 is discouraged. If cruisers can find any open airspace on channel 68 to make a call, they then select two working stations in case of the very likely event that the fist one is already in use.

I spent my days attending a HAM seminar on Hamburger Beach, where I picked up a lot of great tips, hiking the trails on Stocking Island, and meeting up with various cruisers I had met before along the Intra Coastal Waterway and throughout the Bahamas. The most amazing boat I met was Argo 5. While living in Rimouski, Quebec, he started to dive extensively on the wreck of the Empress of Ireland. At 1,012 souls lost, the Empress was the worst maritime disaster in Canadian history, and I sailed over her last summer on my way down the St. Lawrence. Eventually, he decided to salvage some of her teak decking. Later, after moving to the Quebec-Labrador border, he used the wood to do all of the woodwork on his boat. Here I was in the Bahamas at 23^o31' N sitting on the deck of the Empress of Ireland!