Mutton, rail meat, Georgetown Beat!

We are eating out of Styrofoam in a shack. It’s a green shack and we’re eating mutton.

It’s a slapdash shack in a makeshift row of candy coloured structures, plucked together over the course of a few days. Wires and cables snake the ground around us and an open faced fan with exposed blades, throws warm dusty air at us. We are lined up against the wall with our tiny plastic forks, futilely spooning rice. The sticky plastic table cloth hosts a number of hot sauces and luke warm cream based salad dressings despite the lack of salad on the menu. There are the usual Bahamian offerings of barbecue ribs and chicken and mutton with peas and rice and macaroni and cheese and plantain. It’s all finger-lickin’-good. And it all goes to the hips. There must be 50 makeshift bars offering rum punches, sky juice (a trendy local gloopy white concoction of gin, sweetened condensed milk and coconut milk), and the local beers – Sands and Kalik, on special.

Over our heads, the local banter reaches epic volumes. It’s a ‘cacophonous symphony’ of shouts and laughter, knee slaps and hollers.

On another level, the base from competing sound systems lifts the floorboards to the incessant beat. Rake n' scrape, the local music pumps out hits like 'All Da Meat', 'Roach on My Bread', 'Bush Mechanic', 'That Ain't No Mosquito Bite' and more...

It’s hot and our clay-dust flip flopped feet have carried us around the tiny town, which is abuzz for the week. It’s the 66^th Annual National Family Island Regatta in Georgetown. Big words for a set of boat races in the harbour. The wooden boats with their giant sails, have been made across the small islands of the Bahamas for generations. Communities across the nation have been preparing and perfecting their vessels and crew since last year’s race. The boat names and their colours are amazing. Barbarians, Confusion, Beerly Legal, I’ve Tried, Ruff Justice, New Slaughter, Termite… etc. all out there, sails puffed, ‘rail meat’ out on the boards, representing their islands!

And we are here, eating steamed mutton in a shack. We will head out to one of the many race viewing vantage points, once our bellies are full, to watch the spectacle unfold. To the untrained eye, it’s organized chaos. With a breathtaking turquoise backdrop.

In the evenings there will be marching bands and fashion shows; the finest and most bizarre come out and flaunt what their mama gave them. There are literally all shapes and sizes, dressed in every colour, material and style imaginable. And some unimaginable. 

There will be music pulsing from giant black speakers piled high, and the partying will continue literally until the sun comes up. Oh, and I’ll be part of that! Lying in bed, facing the music with my 33 decibel industrial grade ear plugs. Zzzzzz.

This is a big event for Georgetown and the ‘out islands’ as they’re called. And we are here. Loving every minute of it. And slurping our mutton bones gleefully.

Ragged Islands: water water everywhere...

Alan is a pretzel. Literally. Knees hug ruddy cheeks; arms twist above and below. He has worked his way down into the awkward cavity at the back of the boat; a salty pretzel with a wrench. The metal steering tiller arm threatens to behead him as he’s jostled about by the waves below.

Shiloh bucks and jolts in tune with the building seas. The wind is picking up which  was not forecast. Surprise surprise. We are anchored in 8 ft of water over the Exuma banks and land is miles away in every direction. We have come through Hog Cay’s narrow channel at high tide and the next island to find protection is over 30 miles away. In sailboat terms, that’s a lot of hours away.

Night is approaching and we are frantic. On anchoring, we discovered our floorboards floating in the port hull. 

With bulging eyes and sinking stomachs we exchange anxious glances. ‘Are we sinking?!!!’, is what we ask without asking. I stick my finger into the greasy sloshing liquid and realise it’s fresh water. Phew! But wait, this means our entire water tanks have emptied into the dirty bilges. Irretrievable. I want to cry.

A day before, we’d negotiated the tedious tying up at Exuma yacht club and spent an hour or two filling the tanks to the brim for our adventure in the land of remoteness…. $50 later, we left, tanks full, hearts happy and excited.

Now, as the water slapped back and forth with the bouncing of the boat, our hearts, if not our boat, have sunk.

The next 4 hours grind by in a sweaty frenzy, JW and Al pumping the lot of it out into the ocean and running tests with our remaining portable water jugs to locate the cause/leak. 

Our queasy guest downs a Gravol and slinks into a cabin into a comatose state to avoid the drama.

By dark, the lot of us feeling green and gutted; the guys have discovered the culprit. An old shower pipe on the ‘sugar scoop’ (back step) had burst and triggered the water pump. It had dutifully pumped the tanks dry. Sigh.

Well, we have to go back to Georgetown! How will we manage 3 weeks in the Raggeds without a drop of water?!

Alan the ultimate optimist jumps up, unfolded from his yogic position and protests. We do have watermakers. Between our two boats, we will make jugs and fill a tank just enough to give us three quick showers and a sink of dishwashing water a day. So hesitantly we agree, and try to regain our enthusiasm. But clearly this is not a good start.

The official Explorer Guides (many cruisers’ bibles for sailing) describe where we are headed as follows:

“This is unpopulated wilderness… You must be totally self-sufficient here…there is a palpable sense of remoteness… we do not encourage casual visiting… there are no marinas, no Search and Rescue help, no fuel, no water… you are on your own here.”

Sleep comes clawing and drags us under, despite the fact the wind has decided to hand us a further warning. It’s howling and kicking up the shallow waters around us, creating a wild vast washing machine as our night’s shelter.

Two days later, we are sitting on a beach, drinks in hand, snacks set up on a ragged piece of wood, chatting with the crew of two other catamarans we found as we sailed around the top of Flamingo Cay. Seems cruiser life as usual. Normal but for the constant drone of the watermaker motor, sucking in that sea water and miraculously churning out trickles of water we can use! Jugs are lugged up and down the stairs, keeping our tanks just full enough…

Fast forward one more day. The watermaker has died. And we are one further island down into the heart of the Ragged Islands. The area where ‘you are on your own, no help, no water, no marinas etc…. Again those exchanged looks of panic and some added frustration. Sod’s Law applies double fold in remote areas. We are not Robinson Crusoe and this issue needs fixing fast.

6 hours later, sweat, blood, chunks of metal rearranged, hammers, wrenches, rust flakes… the watermaker, having been dislodged from it’s cupboard below and brought out into the light, lies exposed on our cockpit table. A casualty of time and salt air. The prognosis is iffy. 

Alan zooms away in his dinghy with the cracked brushes (an essential motor part), and an idea. And we wait. And in the meantime he carries jugs and jugs of water from his boat to ours. Thanks goodness for buddy-boaters. And best friends. The Raggeds would otherwise have defeated us as the ‘holy’ book predicted.

We try to carry on with the business of enjoying the clear blue waters and white sand beaches while the patient lies like a rusty elephant on it’s makeshift hospital gurney. We cover him in old sheets for the night and hope for the best for the next day.

And doctor Al comes through first thing, sun shining extra bright, the water a blue shade of turquoise… with a home glued potentially life-renewing part!!!! 

After two more hours of surgery the patient is returned to his working compartment and the moment of truth… the on button. IT WORKS!!!!!! It works! Phew. It keeps working. Which means we can keep going. So after some cups of tea for the doc and pouring some libations to the gods of remote boat life… we are off. 

Stillness, sting rays and canned peas

I could count the hours until this is over. In fact that’s exactly what I’ve been doing for days. Within 24 hours we will be in international waters, leaving the Bahamas behind for the hurricane season, heading for Ft Pierce and destinations further north.

It could be said we’ve taken 6 months of Bahamian island hopping bliss for granted and now it’s all about to disappear behind us in a blue haze…

But that’s not true. The truth is that I pinch myself (well not literally) all the time. The things we see, feel, and are surrounded by are simply amazing. It does not go unnoticed or unappreciated.

Yesterday the sky and the sea merged. They came together, enveloping us in an endless loop of blue. And I had to catch my breath. No buildings, no boats, no ripple on the water. Just us and blue heaven. Even the air was sucked away.

It was an eery calm that inspired deep thought. Thoughts about what we do with all the moments of our lives. Existential thoughts. And then peace. Hot, sweaty peace. Didn’t even crave a rum cocktail ;)

It was 36C in our saloon and our tiny cabin fans spewed out hot still air that landed on us and blanketed us with sweat.

We had just circled Sandy Cay in the dinghy – our home island for the last few days. 

We hopped in the 35C water to cool off. LOL. And then we had visitors. Wild sting rays who swoop gracefully between our slippery bodies, hoping for an offering. 

It’s been 6 months – this year alone – in the Bahamas, and I still cannot be calm when they come around. By now I should be petting them or at least taking them for granted. But no – if you want to see fast movement, watch me as two 6 foot wide stingrays make a beeline through the still water at me. Holli lounging in the deep water becomes giant splash-kick-splash and voila! Holli safely up in the dinghy.

These are the challenges I face. For now.

Hard to fathom that in 2 days my challenges will include traffic and homeland security bureaucracy and too many food choices!

Right now we are on an ‘inventory reduction diet’. The freezer is empty and there hasn’t been a vegetable onboard for 2 weeks. We had stopped in the island/town of Grand Cay (population somewhere between 200 and 300), in hopes of finding a cabbage or a tomato to sustain us through our last week. But no. It was a couple cans of soggy-sodium laden pseudo-veggies. The trade offs of life in paradise. Scurvy. Call us pirates.

So after a supper of ramen and canned mush we looked out at the utter stillness. And as the sun set, somewhere beyond all the calm, a pink sky developed. Took the place of the blue, and it reflected on the water and once again we were enveloped in something so natural yet so ‘otherworldly’. 

How can we leave this all behind and surround ourselves with honking car horns and pollution and shopping malls and fast food joints with their garish coloured road signs, screaming adverts at us constantly?

It’s a sailor’s dilemma. We need the things from shore. We need towns and stores. But out here, there is another world all together. A world everyone should experience.

Forget the mosquitos, no-see-ums, rolling anchorages, lightning squalls, dumb founding heat, cramped quarters, moldy cabins, culinary sparseness… forget all that because tonight, our little mattresses and pillows dragged up front, as we lie out under the stars and slowly drift off to sleep with meteor showers above us, nothing else exists.

Glorious silence, neon toys and canned food - The Exuma reality

I’m squinting at the tiny mangrove roots, marveling that they push up through the mushy white sand. Sun bakes my dry corn-husk hair and exposed limbs. The tide is rapidly flowing out through rivers to the sea, leaving our dinghy exposed on the ever growing beach. We are like castaways. Salt caked and leather brown. Our small bottle of water is empty. 

JW and I sit in silence in the sand on this uninhabited island in the Exumas. Tiny resilient seeds and crispy dry leaves whisper as they tumble along the sand, at home in this harsh environment. The only other sounds are far off airplanes and distant speed boats. They try to encroach, to remind us that this reality is small and confined. But it’s ours. And it is wild and it’s free.

It could be a Saturday or a Tuesday. Shiloh is anchored out in the unprotected bay, a huge ocean swell slapping her from side to side. We’ve escaped to the shore for some peace from the incessant rolling. 

We’ve been in the Exumas for 6 weeks. We left the last town two weeks ago. The last ‘proper’ grocery store about 4 weeks ago. We’ve run out of beers and cokes and snacks. Same with eggs and bread. Haven’t seen a fresh vegetable in a while. We are in the land of the scarce.

The Bahamas Telecom network forgot about the northern Exumas as well. But we’ve managed to devise a makeshift system for getting an Internet signal once every few days. Our iphone is double wrapped in ziplock bags, then tied to a keychain float and hoisted up the mast. If we are lucky it finds weak reception and we scramble to answer emails, check in on facebook. Say hello to the real world. And then we sink back into the salty, sun soaked world of islands we love so much.

This is the land of shifting sand that creates works of art daily. Swirls of electric turquoise, emerald green, soft teal, creamy beige. And if you can hike to any vantage point above, the rewards are awe and amazement and a humbling so profound. It floors me daily. This is natural beauty unmatched. White tropic birds with their long ribbon tails swirl above, turning blue over the water with the reflection of the sea, and back to white over land. 

Each island offers something unique – hikes to ancient ruins, bubbling pools to play in between the ocean and rocks.

Earlier today we took kayaks and the SUP and paddled a dense and still mangrove river out to the ocean on an outgoing tide.  

Some days the silence is broken – pierced by the wild whirling jet skis of the mega yacht crowd. From any shoreline you might see, anchored out in the deeper waters, a colossal white or silver multi-million dollar, crew-run floating funhouse for the rich. In this place where nature is king and money is useless, it is a jarring sight. And the huge tenders with their massive outboard engines cut through the waters with disregard, shuttling the privileged owners and guests to-and-fro. Some take over a beach with elaborate umbrella systems, blankets, baskets, neon pink and green beach toys that bob around at the water’s edge, claiming their territory. 

Today it is a convoy of power boats, here to break the silence. Down from Nassau for the weekend; kids, beers, bright toys. The breathtaking beach at the end of the mangrove river is overtaken by bikinis and bellies and exuberant chatter. The decibel level is too high for us. We haven’t been in a crowd forever it seems.

They are friendly enough, one guy in a Blue Jays baseball cap sipping a Labatt Blue he’s brought all the way from Canada. “It’s snowing back home!” he tells me, as his little pink two year old, clad in full body sun-shade armour and a wide brimmed hat that covers his whole face, plays happily in the sand. I can barely hear him. My mind does not compute. Snow? Holiday makers with Canadian beer? It seems absurd. I thought we were castaways in our own little world. I think I wished it so.

But this world, free and wild as it is, must be shared. It must come to an end even for us. One day soon our canned goods will run out too. We will need to make a bank transfer or talk on a phone. My backpack/purse will have to be transformed from a sandy vessel for water, sea shells and sun block, to wallets and cell phones. The real world will call to us and we will have to answer.

But for now intense sun. Salt. Sand. Silence.

Bahamas, USA: I choose adventure

People ask ‘Don’t you get bored’?

People gasp when we say we’ve been in the Bahamas for 6 months.

They scratch their heads and roll their eyes and say things like ‘Really?!’

Last night padding along yet another long white sand beach, we plotted and schemed – could we stay the whole season? – why not head further south in the Bahamas and enjoy a few more months? – what would we do in a hurricane? 

Weather plays a huge role in our lives and the storms of late have certainly kept us on our toes. Lightning, thunder and predictions of tropical storm development all around us.

In the end we resigned ourselves: we will go. America beckons. We will lift our anchor midday and set off across a little section of the Atlantic ocean and leave this expanse of paradise behind us.

By this weekend we’ll have replaced the dodging of jellyfish in the water, with dodging traffic - grocery bags in hand.

We will have the tangible memory of turquoise in our minds as the boats float in a broth of brown and grey…

A sea of turquoise off Little Sale Cay

No more searching tiny towns for the one onion and the last bottle of fresh milk in the fridge. Shopping will no longer be an adventure. Choice will overwhelm and bury us…

Organization and street lights; order and civilization, will take the place of stars in a vast sky, beaches and rocks and the distant sound of soca beating.

It’s a difficult trade off for people who’ve decided to make the sea their home. It’s like deliberately moving from a holiday resort to a concrete jungle.

It’s like choosing the mall over the beach.

But we’ve got landy pleasures planned. We’ll surely munch beignettes on Bourbon Street in New Orleans and comb the streets of tiny towns in Alabama. We’ll feel the breeze in our hair as we fly down a highway in the USA. It will be a rush.

Sure, we’ll have boat repairs and laundry and more lightning storms to endure as well.

But will we ‘get bored’??

I don’t think so.