March 2009

March came in with a roar. Chris Parker was forecasting the "cold front of the winter", so Sea Star and Windsong weighed our anchors in Black Point and headed for the perfect protection of Cambridge Cay. Many other boats had the same idea so the mooring field was already full. Not a problem, since there was plenty room to anchor and fantastic holding bottom. The front hit at 3 am and blew in the upper 20's for four hours then tapered off to 20 knots. I don’t know about "cold front of the winter" but it was a pretty good one.

I was torn between staying with Dan and Kathy to meet their son and daughter-in-law or taking off on my own to chase Columbus. I had it all planned out to cover both of his possible routes. From Georgetown, I would sail north to Cape Santa Maria, west to Rum Cay, then north again to Watlings/San Salvador. This would cover Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison’s accepted theory which had Columbus landing at Watlings (which has been renamed San Salvador in honour of the name Columbus gave it) then proceeding to Rum, which he named Santa Maria de la Concepcion, then Long Island, which he named Fernandina. From Watlings I would sail 100 miles southeast to Samana. In 1882, Gustavus V. Fox analysed Columbus’ logs of his travels through the Bahamas to Cuba and concluded that he must have made landfall at Samana. In 1986, Joseph Judge of the National Geographic Society reached the same conclusion. From Samana I would follow the Fox/Judge route to Crooked/Acklins, the south end of Long Island and perhaps even Fortune Island, which Columbus named Isabella for his Queen.

My autopilot made the decision for me on the way back to Black Point. The belt began slipping such that it could only steer under moderate seas with minimal weather helm. I took it apart to discover that the belt was horribly stretched out and beginning to shred. My Columbus route would be open ocean sailing with a longest run of 100 miles. Slocum and Moitessier would have laughed at doing something so simple without an autopilot, but it was well beyond me. I e-mailed Sea and Ski for a replacement belt and decided to join Sea Star and their guests for a repeat tour of the Exumas.

While at Black Point we received some sad news. Our friends Carol and Dave on Passport, who had sailed through the Jumentos with us, had to run to Georgetown because Skipper, their diabetic ship’s cat, had taken a turn for the worse. Skipper didn’t make it. Spot happy accepted Skipper’s catnip, cat grass, and kitty litter. Her favourite thing was the Revolution which finally cured her of the fleas she picked up in Nassau. Skipper’s death made me realize that things could have been a whole lot worse than losing my autopilot.

On March 6, we sailed for Staniel Cay in anticipation of Dan and Kathy’s son Tom and daughter-in-law Anina’s arrival the next morning. Tom and Anina arrived stark white, reminding me of how long I have been in the sun and how wintery it still is back home. We had dinner at Club Thunderball and planned out their adventure.

We sailed first for Shroud Cay at the Northern end of the Exuma’s Land and Sea Park. It was a part of the Exumas that I had never seen before. Shroud Cay is actually an archipelago of small keys joined by a large mangrove swamp giving it a totally different character from any other island in the Exumas. We anchored in Fresh Well Bay then jumped in the dinghies for another Apocalypse Now style dinghy run, twisting and turning our way through the mangrove creeks at top speed. We found our way to an opening on the east side of the key and found the trail up to Camp Driftwood. We climbed up and checked out the fantastic view. You could see why this was the location that the DEA used to set up their camera to spy on planes coming in going from Carlos Lehder’s runway on Norman’s Cay. Lehder was a Columbian smuggler who purchased Norman Cay in January 1979 and began using it as a base to move Medellin Cartel cocaine to Florida and South Georgia. Within months the DEA set up Operation Caribe to investigate Lehder. Agents posing as cruisers feigned mechanical breakdowns in the anchorage and surveillance was set up at Camp Driftwood and on a Coast Guard cutter offshore. On September 14, 1979, 260 Bahamian police officers raided Norman’s Cay arresting Lehder and 33 of his men. Apparently, no evidence of drug smuggling was found. Lehder was released after handing over a brief case said to contain $250,000 and he and his men were back on the cay within 48 hours. The DEA choked off Lehder’s cash flow by arresting his pilots and confiscating his planes. By 1983 Lehder had left the cay and was living in Columbia as a fugitive. He was finally captured by Columbian authorities on February 5, 1987 outside Medellin and extradited to the United States. On May 19, 1988, he was convicted and sentence to life without parole plus 135 years. Looking north toward Norman’s Cay, it was nice to know the Lehder was no longer there.

In the morning I followed the trail to the bay’s namesake freshwater well. It was a big natural sinkhole in the rocks surrounded by a low stone wall. Reportedly, it has some of the best water in the Bahamas and was used heavily by the sponging boats that worked the area in the early 1900's. Personally, I’d rather stick to the reverse osmosis water made available for cruisers at spigots in many towns.

We set sail in the late morning for Warderick Wells where I went for a walk up the Boo-Boo Hill Trail. Boo-Boo Hill is topped with a cairn and piles of driftwood plaques left by visiting cruisers. The hill is named in honour of the ghosts of a ship full of missionaries that was wrecked nearby. It is said that on moonlit nights you can hear them singing hymns and calling to each other. The legend comes from the nearby blow hole. Waves entering a partially submerged sea cave force air, and often a whole lot of water, up through a hole in the rocks. There was no water coming out today, but it was able to blow my hat off with one big "BOO!!".

On the way up the hill, I met Stu and Keli from Beannacht (pronounced bann-oth) meaning blessing in Gaelic. I had seen their boat as I was leaving Shroud Cay and noticed that her port of registry was Vancouver. Keli was a sailor from Vancouver and she met Stu while working in Ireland. Stu had never sailed before, but she convinced him to quit his job and take off for a couple years of cruising. Now there’s some role reversal!

The following day we snorkelled The Ranger’s Garden and Judy’s Reef. In The Ranger’s Garden we saw a coral head crawling with lobsters, and a porcupine fish. At Judy’s Reef we saw another porcupine fish, a huge barracuda, and large schools of several species of schooling fish.

From there we headed to Cambridge Cay. We snorkelled a few of our favourite reefs from of last visit including the Sea Aquarium, Airplane Reef, Tom’s Elkhorn Reef, and the Rocky Dundas Caves. We also checked out the reefs behind the small islands lining the mooring field. Here Anina refused to enter the water because there was a Steve Erwin killing stingray under the dinghy. The furious beast didn’t move a millimetre the whole time we were there. Eventually, she decided that it would have a hard time stabbing her through the heart from 10 feet below the surface and she joined us swimming through the corals. I visited another new site on my own. Larry’s Reef with its four foot high stand of rare pillar coral, is the largest remaining such stand in the Bahamas or Caribbean. It looked like red Dr. Seussesque chimneys emerging from underground factories. I only got a short look because, despite trying to arrive at slack tide, the dinghy and I were washed past it in a pretty big hurry.

On our final day at Cambridge Cay, Rick and Eliena, the mooring hosts, sent us to Rachel's Bubble Bath on Compass Cay. It started out with a dinghy ride through the fairly rough waters of Conch Cay Cut. We were told that the rougher it was, the better it would be. What could we be heading for? We landed on the beach and walked up the mangrove creek following the signs on sticks driven into the sand. The creek ended at Rachel’s Bubble Bath, a deep pool with a low spot where waves from Exuma Sound could break right over the rocks and into the pool. I waited for a break in the waves and tied a rope to the rocks in the centre of the wash. We held on to the rope for dear life. Whoever Rachel was, she was not into nice gentle bubble baths. It was more like Rachel’s Getting Blasted in the Face by a Dozen Fire Hoses. The waves would blast through and we would whip around on the rope like flags in a hurricane. I had to wear my mask and snorkel so I could breathe. There was so much foam that I could rarely see through the water. One wave washed all five of us off of the rope. No one could hold on. Another blew my mask off of my face. I held on to it by the lugs of my snorkel in my teeth long enough to grab it. A third ripped the rope right off of the rocks.

We went to Compass Cay Marina for lunch. They had ten pet nurse sharks in the Marina, several of which had been named. There was a sign reading "Swim with the sharks at your own risk." It appeared to have been updated with every incident. Below it was nailed "Do not feed the sharks while swimming with them. Below that was "Do not poke the sharks." And below that was "Do not pull the sharks’ tails or fins." I couldn’t resist and went for a short swim with the sharks. Admittedly, I slipped carefully and smoothly into the water instead of my usual crashing Cousteau back roll off of the dinghy. One seemed annoyed if I cast a shadow over it and kept moving away. Other than that, the killers ignored me.

When we got back to Cambridge Cay, a huge sailboat had just come into the mooring field and jammed a mooring pennant into their bow thruster. I’m not sure if the boat was 62 or 72 feet but you pretty much needed a golf cart to get from the cockpit to the bow. Rick, the mooring host, was already on the scene. I dinghied over and offered my SCUBA tanks, then we both tied off our dinghies and dove in. Neither of us were planning on snorkelling so we didn't have our wetsuits. The bow thruster was retractable and the pennant had jammed between the tube for the bow thruster and the hull. We tried pulling together on the ball end of the pennant with no luck. Then we took turns diving down and wiggling on the loop end with all of our might. We soon realized that holding your breath and pulling as hard as you can are not compatible activities. I was impressed that Rick could do it for longer than I could. I took a line, dove down, and secured it to the mooring anchor so that they could take the load off of the mooring pennant. Then I secured another line to the pennant and we tried to convince them to bring it to a winch. I figured it would come free easily if it was pulled on with some mechanical advantage. The owner was so focussed on trying to get his bow thruster working again that we couldn’t get anyone to try winching on our line. A third guy had his dinghy on the side of the boat that we were working on, and we were getting cold so we climbed out into it. We still couldn’t convince anyone to winch on our line. Rick and I sat in the dinghy sopping wet with no wetsuits and had a contest to see who was the skinniest. I won because, try as I might, I could not control my shivering. The lady on board brought us towels and I finally climbed the five foot high side of the boat to try to get the line on a winch. I walked around the deck with my mask on like Bill Murray in The Life Aquatic because my glasses were in my dinghy and I would be completely blind without the prescription lenses in my mask. At least I took my fins off! They had two windlasses but one was loaded with the line I had secured to the mooring anchor and the other was holding one of the boat’s own anchor on board. I ran the line aft instead to one of their primary winches. The boat was so long that the line wouldn’t reach. We tied a genny sheet to it and got it on the winch. There was no grinding to do because the winches were electric. The owner pushed the button and the 5/8 line stretched like a rubber band. No joy. The guy in the dinghy untied the line and tied it to the loop on the pennant, we tried again, and she popped free. All that was left was for me to dive down to release the line from the mooring anchor then return to my boat for a gallon of hot chocolate.

Sea Star departed for Black Point, and Windsong headed back to Warderick Wells to pick up my copy of Steve Pavlidis’ Exuma Guide that had just come in. I was also anxious to see the Pirate Lair. It was a fabulous sail and I was able to sail right in past Bonney Rock, Read Rock, Teach Rock, and Pegleg Rock.

Bonney and Read were the lady pirates Anne Bonney and Mary Read who sailed with Calico Jack Rackham. Anne Bonney moved to Nassau with her penniless sailor husband. There she fell in love with Calico Jack and helped him to steal his sloop Revenge. Mary Read was raised as a boy by her mother and went to sea dressed as a man. Her ship was captured by Calico Jack and she joined the crew still posing as a man. Anne Bonney thought she was a handsome young fellow and took a liking to her. This forced her to reveal her gender to a much disappointed Bonney. The two became fast friends leading Calico Jack to conclude that they were having an affair. When Jack threatened to cut her throat, he too was let in on the secret. Mary took the ship’s carpenter or navigator as a lover. He had a disagreement with another more experienced pirate. Fearing that her lover was no match for this man in a duel, Mary engaged the man herself. In the middle of the fight, Mary tore her blouse open revealing her gender (among other things). Apparently, the pirate really liked what he saw. He was so stunned that she was able to grab his cutlass and stab him to death with it. Calico Jack was finally captured in October 1720, by Captain Jonathan Barnet in Port Royal Jamaica. Anne, Mary, and one other crew were the last men fighting. Calico Jack was hung then his body was tarred and hanged on public display in a cage. Before his death, Anne Bonney is reputed to have said to him, "I am sorry to see you here Jack, but if you had fought like a man, you need not be hanged like a dog." Anne and Mary escaped such a fate by pleading their bellies. English law at the time forbade hanging a pregnant woman. Mary Read died of a pregnancy related fever in April 1721, while Anne Bonney somehow was spared the noose and disappeared from the pages of history. Teach of course, was Edward Teach, the notorious Blackbeard.

While dreaming of pirates, I had not checked the chart carefully enough, and I now realized that I would have to cross a one metre sounding to get to my destination at Emerald Rock. It was an hour after high tide. The water was probably high enough for me to make it through, but if I grounded, I would likely be stuck for almost 12 hours waiting for the tide to come back up. I decided to pretend that Governor Woodes Rogers had sent Captain Hornigold after me. The only way my shallow draft sloop could escape his man-o-war was to slip over the bar onto the banks. As the bottom rose to 4½ feet, I released the genny sheet to slow down and glided over the bar with only one gentle touch. Rogers and Hornigold may have expelled the pirates and restored commerce but they would never capture Windsong!

I chose Emerald Rock because it was halfway between my two goals. I hopped in the dinghy and sped to the Park Office where I picked up my book then tore off toward the southern anchorage and the Pirate’s Lair. When I arrived in the south anchorage by dinghy, I wished I had brought Windsong in. The place was empty. It would have been the only time in the Bahamas that I had an anchorage to myself. Unfortunately, the tide was now far too low to get back over the bar. I floated over the stromatolites, early reef building bacteria dating back 3.5 billion years. They were thought to be extinct until they were discovered in the Bahamas in 1983. I landed on the beach in front of the Pirate’s Lair and surveyed the harbour. The place was perfect for pirates, covering all of your buccaneering needs. Wide Opening Channel was only five miles away. In the early 1700's this was a popular route for merchant ships bound for Nassau laden with booty for the taking. The north entrance was clear enough to enter day or night and had 12 feet of water admitting pirate sloops but barring the way to deeper naval vessels. The rigging of an anchored pirate ship would blend into the high ridges of Warderick Wells while the ship’s hull would be hidden behind Hog Cay. Ashore was a lovely flat area for lounging and a freshwater well. It was this area that has become known as the Pirate’s Lair. Pirates brought straw mats ashore here to sit, drink, and brag of their exploits. Caught in the mats were cabbage palm and grass seeds from their haunts in Louisiana. These seeds were shaken loose and today Louisianan grass and Cabbage Palms grow here and nowhere else in the Bahamas. In the shade of these pirate planted palms, I had to wonder if I was standing in the footsteps of Blackbeard, Anne Bonney, Mary Read, and Calico Jack Rackham.

I arrived the next day for my rendezvous with Sea Star at Staniel Cay. There was no sign of her. Eventually, I contacted them by radio and discovered that Tom and Anina had rescheduled their flight to leave from Black Point. It was too late for me to make it there to say good bye. I was disappointed, but that evening I was able to watch a flight of a different kind. There was an announcement on the VHF that the Space Shuttle Discovery was about to be launched carrying solar panels and other electrical equipment to the International Space Station. A cruiser provided a simulcast from mission control on VHF channel 12. I took a bearing on Cape Canaveral from my charting program so I would know where to look, turned up the radio and sat back to watch the show. The shuttle launched at 7:43pm. A few minutes later an orange streak pierced the clouds covering the horizon. Then a strange cloud began to glow high in the night sky. The exhaust gases left a cloud so high up in the atmosphere that the suns rays could reach it even though it was long after sunset. When the simulcast from NASA was over, the cruisers chimed in with, "Beam me up Scotty!" and, "I’m given her all I can Cap’n!"

I met up with Sea Star in Black Point and we proceeded to Little Farmers Cay. We had dinner there with a large group of cruisers. After dinner, the waitress fired up the stereo and made us all sing the Little Farmers Cay Song. A good time was had by all, but no one would disagree that the waitress was the only one who knew how to sing!

From Little Farmer’s we set sail for Georgetown. It was a lousy sail, the autopilot wouldn’t work worth a damn, I stubbed my toe, and spilled my coffee. Dan and Kathy could hear me cursing from Sea Star. I wound up hand steering all day dreaming of the new autopilot belt that was waiting for me at Sea and Ski. I anchored for the first two nights in the secret anchorage with free internet so that I could get in touch with Sea and Ski to arrange shipping. Then I moved across to Monument Beach and anchored next to Windsong a Hunter I had last seen in the Chesapeake. Soon Windsong the Atlantic 42 catamaran joined us and the place became known as Windsong Row.

On March 24 Dan, Kathy, and I took Windsong across the harbour to town. It was blowing so hard from the east that you couldn’t cross the harbour in a dinghy. The purpose of our trip was to get our visitors permits extended. When Dan and Kathy mentioned that they needed their permits extended, I decided to take a look at mine. It expired two weeks ago. Oops! We decided that Dan and Kathy should go into immigration first so that the guy would still be in a good mood. I walked in after them and explained my situation. The officer gave me the kind of disappointed look that I thought could only come from one of your own parents. "Mon, you gotta be more careful about keeping track of dees tings." I had to write a letter to the minister of immigration explaining that I was a moron and hadn’t bothered to look at the expiration date on my permit until weeks after it had expired. I was then given an hour to sit in the waiting room and think about what I had done before I was issued my extension.

I returned to town the next day alone aboard Windsong. It was still too windy cross the harbour in a dinghy. This time I was going to pick up my package from Sea and Ski. The package wasn’t there. Kidd Cove, named after the infamous Captain Kidd who was once the harbourmaster, was totally exposed to the brunt of the blow. I would have to fight the boat up into the wind to weigh anchor so that I could return to the calm of Monument Beach anchorage. This is really easy with someone on the helm to motor the boat toward the anchor. Arnold himself could not have pulled the boat up to the anchor against that wind. The only recourse was to lock the wheel, put the engine in gear, give it a little throttle, and run to bow. Then the bow swung back and forth across the wind and I tried to get in as much anchor line as I could each time the bow swung toward the anchor. When I got down to the last 20 feet of chain, the anchor broke free and began dragging along the bottom. Normally, the anchor comes in very easily at this point, but today there was enough drag that I still couldn’t pull it in. I slowly drifted toward the marina as I hauled with all of my might. Finally, the anchor came up and I ran back to the helm. As soon as I throttled up and spun the wheel, the dinghy painter wrapped around the prop stalling the engine. I was sliding sideways toward the pilings of the marina with no engine. I threw the anchor back down and thankfully it held. If it hadn’t, the boat would have been beaten to splinters on the marina pilings.

The dinghy painter would not come free through any above water effort. The stern of the boat was flying up and down. I figured that if I dove in, I would get hit in the head by the boat and knocked out. It turns out that the reason the stern flies up and down when anchored in big waves is that the water is going up and down. Once I dove under the boat, the motion was barely noticeable. Boat, water, and idiot Captain moved up in down in perfect unison. The painter wasn’t too badly wrapped and I got it free on one breath. The next act was to fight the boat back into the wind to win the anchor once more. I was so close to the marina by now that there was absolutely no room left for me to screw up again. Thankfully, the anchor came up as easily as is possible under such adverse conditions. Then, when I got back to my original nice sheltered anchorage, I succeeded in dropping my anchor on the only patch of weed around so it didn’t hold. I had to do the whole battle to bring the boat up to the anchor against near gale force winds all over again. Thankfully, I found the sand on the second attempt and the anchor got a good bite.

My right eye had been bothering me, and my dive under the boat hadn’t done it any favours. It became totally blood shot and painful. Soon a blood vessel burst turning half of the eye scarlet red. I needed to see a doctor and the next flight that my package could be on was coming in, but I had no desire for another fight with Windsong’s anchor. Fortunately, Toby on the power yacht Duchess was heading across the harbour to pick up his own package in his huge hard bottom inflatable and he offered me a ride. It was a much nicer way to get to town, but my package was still not there. I did get to see the doctor but I’m not sure which was worse, the pain in my eye or the eye drops she gave me.

Terry aboard Wind Whisperer organised a meeting on Hamburger Beach for boats going south. Most boats were planning on following the Thorny Path to windward to the Turks and Caicos, Dominican Republic, and so on along the island chain to South America. Dan, Kathy, and I were fortunate to meet Alison and Randall aboard Tregoning who were planning on heading to Panama via Jamaica. This seemed like a more sensible route since it would be down wind all the way. We hatched a plan to head north to Conception Island and Rum Cay, before making the run to Samana were we could walk in the footsteps of Columbus. From there we would head south to Great Inagua and on to Jamaica.

Unfortunately, my package still hadn’t arrived and I was going nowhere without an autopilot. The weather broke, so Sea Star and Tregoning set sail for Conception Island. I stayed behind to wait for my parts. The courier had promised that they would be on the March 31^st flight. I motored across the harbour to pick up the long awaited package. I had noticed a slow leak the last few times that I had run the engine. With my sore eye, I hadn’t felt up to tracking down the problem. Today it was clear that there could be no more procrastination in finding the leak. The bilge pump was going at full tilt to keep up. I dropped my anchor in Kidd Cove and pulled out the stairs to take a look at the engine. Clearly, a river had been flowing from the back of the engine. It was quickly traceable to a pencil zinc that had vibrated its way out of the heat exchanger. Instead of exiting through the exhaust pipe, my cooling water was pouring out into the bilge. The zinc had to be under the engine but it was far too hot to feel around underneath it without burning myself. I had plenty to do while I waited for the engine to cool.

I ran ashore, threw my laundry in at the laundry mat, sent Clifford the cabbie to the airport to pick up my package, grabbed some last minute groceries, and completed Windsong’s water by running back and forth to the spigot with my dinghy loaded full of jerry cans. Clifford returned and my package had finally arrived. I dove excitedly into the package and soon my autopilot was operational again. Then I began groping around under the engine in search of the missing zinc. Nothing. It must have been washed down into the bilge. I forced my hands into every last nook and cranny, coating them with grease and finding every sharp edge to slice them on. Still nothing. I ran a hose into the engine compartment just behind the engine hoping to wash the zinc out of the inaccessible aft section of the bilge. Still nothing. Windsong finally had the autopilot I needed to make the blue water passages ahead, but if I started the engine, she would slowly sink.