When your home is your boat

Rainbow coloured bottles of nail polish lie on their sides in the cabin, rolling around like bright felled soldiers in anguish.

Elsewhere in the front cabin, onion skins cover the surfaces like a vegetable confetti from a wild party. The onions themselves lie around the floor and bed like drunkards on the morning after. Plastic wine glasses line the hallway.

Across in the other hull the carnage is also evident.  In the tiny head (washroom), bottles of shampoo, hurled from their high shelf perch, lie bleeding sticky bubbly pink into the drain.

It’s been a rough day at sea. Everything has been tossed and slammed and kicked around by some grudge filled side-on waves. But Shiloh has survived. Despite the casualties around the cabins, Shiloh has excelled. Despite the all consuming groans of wood on fiberglass inside, she showed a brave face. She sailed today, all day, fast and furious. Like a dance with the wind, she came up to meet each wave, each gust of wind, and she pushed forward, she sailed. Beautifully.

Unlike her inhabitants, the awkward bulls in the china shop, grasping each surface as we passed, trying to keep our composure, our balance against the wishes of the forces around us.

It was our first sail after my trip to Canada, and it was a baptism by fire in many ways. It reacquainted me with all the good and the bad that is sailing life. Once we reached the lee of Great Abaco Island, nine long hours after leaving the shores of Nassau, the waves were tamed, the wind eased off and the conditions were much more pleasant for us ‘inhabitants’. Shiloh on the other hand, preferred the challenge of a big sea and a beam reach.

A day before our little journey, we’d played host to some ladies from Canada. A day on a boat. It was a detour for them, from a short holiday to Atlantis. For us it was a chance to imagine what it might be like to charter the boat. It was exhilarating, it was fun to be host. Champagne and OJ with snacks, a short trip to a pretty little island out of the hectic Nassau port for snorkeling and swimming. 

It was so different from the reality of our day to day life on the boat. I’ve got a lot of respect for our friends who charter for weeks at a time. Mike and Muffy on Extasea and Mike and Rebecca who did the same on One Love for two years. When your maritime home, with all it’s inherent problems (engine issues, limited water supply, incessant mold growth, limited power etc etc), becomes the hotel for 6 or 8 people for a week full time, that must be intense. Meals, snacks, drinks, towels, entertainment. Full time! Hats off to the charterers.

For us the sacrifices are far more abstract. When you’ve made the choice to ‘live the dream’ you make some other choices by default. When your first grand baby is born, you are thousands of miles away. Maybe without phone or internet. Maybe you are facing storms or just big waves. You are preoccupied. Your life is moving along on a very different path.

When your boy graduates from the relative security of college and his last faction of childhood, you can fly across a continent for only a short time to see him through, to watch him take off. But then you must return to the sea, because you know that he has his own life to live and you still have yours. Your sails are still full and they are blowing you once again, somewhere else.

But us cruisers are still parents. We still ache and worry for them. We still look at a photo of them with baby fat and glistening innocent eyes, and tears well in our salty eyes. We might be on a thousand mile journey to an uninhabited island in a vast ocean, or fighting a rusty washing machine in some city in the developing world, but we will never leave the first path we travelled. The path of never ending love for our children.

We are just different. We crave adventure to a fault. We don’t mind hand pumping our toilets. We conserve water so we can go for an extra week without visiting a city. And we get excited when our boat sails. No engines. All sails up. That feeling when the wind works with you and the power in the silence. Even if it means cleaning the aftermath in the cabins later.

Beaches Breezes and Fox Town Feeds Us

We’re in Fox Town only there are no foxes here, neither the animal or urban dictionary type.

Fox Town has a population of just over 200 people. It has a church (of course), and a restaurant/town bar called Da Valley with it’s own dock. And one table.

Next door there is a Shell station which consists of two ancient pumps next to the road. No building, no shelter per say. But the fuel hose reaches all the way down to the dock to serve the few local speed boats.

There is no bank or ATM for 60 miles.

There are three stores. These are not stores in the traditional sense. There are no signboards or overhead fluorescent lights. Each store is the front room of a house with one domestic fridge and two or three hand crafted wooden shelves displaying whatever they have. 

Yesterday we arrived and scrambled to shore to shop!  Between the three stores we were able to get one sweet potato (last one in town!), a dozen eggs, two tomatoes, a green pepper that was only half rotting, and a head of lettuce. A head of lettuce!

No cabbage or fresh milk or salami or dark chocolate (haha!!), or anything much else for that matter. Judy of Da Valley, drives the 80 miles down to Marsh Harbour randomly, and comes back with items to sell in the shops. No one can tell what day or week she might go. 

Judy of Da Valley

Unless you are a desperate clan of cruisers who arrive on the verge of scurvy, having spent the better part of two weeks without a fresh vegetable, and who beg, I mean inquire, as to when she would go next and would she entertain the idea of taking our shopping lists. It’s either that or sail two days through some tricky shallows and come all the way back…

And as it goes, Judy said yes!!! So we wait until Monday when she will go and bring us some food. And hence we find ourselves anchored in Fox Town on a Sunday. Nothing is open but the church, so there’s no point going to shore.

Since the local fishermen feed the black tip sharks in this bay, there will be no swimming either. 

We have been spoiled by walks and leisurely swims on beaches and nightly braais (barbecues) on said beaches for the past two weeks. 

We visited Allen's Pensacola Cay which has bushes and beaches and a Hilton sign painted on a shack. It has a few trails that lead to huge trees, littered with boater's names and dates of visiting. Those who'd come before us. And so we set to making our own sign to leave a legacy of plastic beads and good vibes. While our friends and family afar worked at desks, we worked on our sign and we hung it with pride.

And then that task was completed and the beaches had all been walked and inhaled and photographed. 

We haven’t been to an island with more than 6 people as it’s population. It’s been refreshing and special and peaceful.

But we crave a bit of civilization after a while. And even a burger. Last night at Da Valley we sat at the one table and gasped and moaned in gastronomic ecstacy as we gobbled down burgers and fries. And yes, they are NOT on our diet but every rule has been thrown out the window as we emerge from the beachy wilderness into the cosmopolitan metropolis of Fox Town.

Fun times with friends at Da Valley

Today, with no agenda, we’ll probably take the dinghies out in search of a deserted beach…

Life aboard - day 1,100

My captain is on the foredeck on his knees, giving mouth to mouth to a giant blow up canoe. I’m in the galley with soapy hands, scrubbing the breakfast dishes, smiling at the spectacle.

It’s a Saturday morning but it could just as easily be any day. Morning is slipping into afternoon. Hours ago we decided we’d ‘get those canoes out’ and go for a paddle in this idyllic setting. And as it goes, ‘getting out those canoes’ morphed into half a day of digging, dismantling, climbing into tight, hot, extremely awkward spaces and rearranging everything from bicycles to big rubber fenders and bags of winter clothes. Deep down in the bowels of our boat. I faired well, coming out of it with spots of bike grease and only a few bruises.

Now we’re on the water, managed to get into the canoes without capsizing which in my book is an accomplishment. If we stop now I’ll still be happy. But no, we follow our buddies, 4 floating canoes, through the anchored boats and toward the mangroves ahead. I’m soaked minutes in, maybe I don’t quite get this rhythm with the oars, but each time I lift and dip I get a shower…

Nevertheless I am out here, doing this cool, exercise-eey type thing, in touch with nature and all that. We need a photo! “John! Take a picture!” Captain is prepared. Gets the waterproof camera out of the canoe’s dry compartment. And… and… oh shit. Battery is dead. So no pictures then. No proof I actually did this.

And then Al who’s in the lead, shouts back that he’s aground. Its low tide and if we want to go across to the beach – way over there – we’ll have to get out and pull our vessels through this shallow patch. Ok I think, no problem.

Wrong. Problem! As my oars touch ground instead of clear water and I step out to pull, my feet sink into a sludge stew of hot mud, rough long sea grass and chunks of mysterious under water monsters. I have no idea what each step will bring my feet in contact with. I could kill myself for forgetting my shoes. I want to go back. I’m fine with it. I’ve seen lots of beaches. I’ve had my exercise.

But no, everyone insists we carry on, and apparently my groans and yelps are amusing.

I’m the third one through this swamp nightmare. The others are ahead and behind me and I have no choice. And then, just as I’m getting to the end of it, where I can see smooth, clean sandy bottom ahead, I take a step and my foot sinks deep in the mud, right onto an evil spiked sea urchin, and I scream – loud – jumping forward, onto yet another one! This time I jump right into my canoe. I don’t care, I’ll spend the day beached right here in the safety of my canoe!

Captain can hardly stop laughing as he comes through and tugs me along, clung to my canoe, two feet further and we are out of it. I had no lasting injuries - except my dignity – so we carried on, got to the beach and walked through the glorious powder sand, around to the ocean side. Found some warm pools to lounge in between the rough rocks and reconsidered how rough my life was.

Now it’s evening, having survived the day. We have an early supper and head over to the Alley Cats for a pre-‘beach-bonfire-full-moon-party’ drink. Elsewhere it’s Easter weekend. Children will be searching for eggs and adults will be gathering to feast. Many will be in church. We will be on the beach, fending off biting no-see-um bugs, sipping local rum, meeting fellow cruisers over the flickering light of the bonfire. Easter will be a far off concept.

We will watch the rising of the blood red moon, in a clear sky, from Manjack Cay in the Bahamas. Today our home, tomorrow a wonderful memory. 

 

Paradigm shifts and ocean drifts

Stopping for a coffee at any time in any place; pushing through the capitalist octopus of limbs inside, reaching the registers and the underpaid baristas, contrived terminology, over-priced products of Starbucks and it’s imitators.

Fresh milk.

$9.99 a day rental cars

Cars.

Friendly efficient waiters at restaurants

Restaurants.

$1 stores

Stores.

These are some of the things I will miss when we set sail and leave the USA behind us. It’s a count down now in days. A simple 40 mile crossing to Bimini, but a paradigm shift in many ways.

For the past six months we have been observing, indulging, following, frolicking, partying to the tune of America’s drummers. We have sacrificed swimming, snorkeling, solitude for all of this. Glamour, glut, buy-one-get-one.

It’s so easy, being from such a country, to fall into the routine of surplus and safety. Where all your needs will be met. Where you can demand what you want and have the right to receive it. If I’d never ventured away, I’d probably question why anyone would ever want to leave that. But we have, and so we are now members of the global wanderers, maritime squatters, compelled in some way to keep moving, even when there is so much we’d be leaving behind. So much to do, so much to buy. So much of everything really.

But we’ve spent all our money now. We have new TVs, full freezers, matching towel sets. It’s time to go. Back to the quiet beaches and jaw dropping sunsets that mark the days and nights of life in the Bahamas and beyond. Back to the parts of the world where the US coast guard and Towboat US will not be waiting around every corner to help. Where we must judge the weather and maintain our engines and take care of ourselves.

Time to pack away the thick denims and heavy soled shoes. My toes long for cool sand and the hunter in me longs to find sea shells instead of bargains now.

The oil and the filters have been changed and the boat survived. Oil smudges notwithstanding.

Our charts are up-to-date and will hopefully keep us from running aground in the Bahama shallows.

The sails are in tact. The chain has perhaps another year before it will crumble into a rusty pile of salt induced oblivion.

So, no reasons left not to leave.

We’ve visited all the friends, pet the manatees, seen the alligators, partied in the coolest places, and danced to ‘Troprock’ with the Parrotheads. 

This year we need to find some new horizons. Maybe we will head to the Western Caribbean. To Belize, and further. To the San Blas islands where there are no shops nor electricity. No cities or governments. It's been fun in America but it's time for dinghy rides that don't lead to Publix and pubs. Time to close the door on consumer choices and fashion trends. Time for salty hair and sandy bedsheets. To places where mystery and nature are in charge and not Mr. Starbucks...It's time to float and be free. Time to cast off the lines and leave these beaches behind.

To borrow from one of the Troprock icons Jack Mosley, a toast, whatever happens, and wherever we end up:

“to small boats on big oceans, and dreams you can’t drown”.

A serenade to the beauty, the decay, the vastness and the diversity that is the Bahamas

A cacophony of birds serenades, and the warm sun pokes at my shoulder through the cabin hatch, waking me to yet another magnificent Bahamas scene.

Shiloh sits, eerily still in mirrored glass water, if there wasn’t a depth meter to say otherwise, I’d be convinced we’re on terra firma. We’re surrounded by pine trees and the smell of a campfire. I feel as though we’ve been transported to a Canadian lake, only if I dip just one toe in this luke warm water, I’ll know different.

This is Port Lucaya, an unplanned stop for us, and yet another one of Bahamas surprises. Highly developed with many marinas, duty free shops, cruise chips and their thousands of pasty pink skinned, camera happy passengers. It's a change, and like Nassau, a hub of human activity among a largely uninhabited set of semi-tropical isles.

The landscapes are changing, the birds are different. We have moved north. For us, this is the end of the Bahamas. Our last stop before hitting the gulf stream and Florida’s east coast. I can’t believe it really. Two months ago we arrived in sweltering Mayaguana at the southern most end of the Bahamas, to a desolate little settlement. Since then we have visited thousands of worlds within themselves. So many unique little gems with indescribably blue waters, turquoise reflecting on the clouds above. A few with tiny, friendly populations, but many, many with none. Places that feed your soul. 

It’s been a whirlwind tour of opposites. Of islands grouped together by colonial conquest. Places that are beautiful or troubled in their own right. Islands in the ocean, like us. 

From weeks of no shops, no internet, no other human contact in the Exumas, to huge supermarkets and bustling casinos. We’ve been screaming down adrenaline gushing water slides in the opulence of Atlantis resort. 

The Bahamas can’t be described. Many have tried. It’s beautiful, it’s amazing. Some of the islands belie secrets of an opulent past, where the rich made their playgrounds. In their place now, are decaying, crumbling buildings, nature quickly reclaiming their territory. Norman island, the former private fortress of infamous cocaine dealer Carlos Lehder is one of them. It really happened and wasn’t just a scene in Johnny Depp’s movie Blow. And we were there, crunching through the dead leaves that line the floors of the old rooms, imagining the parties and the killings. 

And there are so many ‘almost developments’ – places where visions and dreams were half built – marinas, hotels, huge mansions – all left for dead. Investment lost, lives changed forever. As a transient on the sea sailing past, we can only imagine the stories that surround each place.

And the next day, surrounded only by warm blue waters and sting rays and turtles and white sand beaches -you pinch yourself and wonder whether all the rest was an illusion.

This is the ‘off season’ better known as the hurricane season where the cautious leave this part of the world, holiday cottages, condos and boats all locked up and stored away for the dangerous season, while summer awaits back home in the US or Canada. It means we’ve had so much of these places to ourselves. The only boats in an anchorage, the only ones swimming in a blue hole, the only patrons at a rare bar/restaurant up the chain. It’s been our own paradise and I wouldn’t trade the experience for the hustle and bustle of tourist season at all.

Face to face with an 80 pound grumpy faced grouper in a natural aquarium,  swimming along with a graceful sting ray, sand combing with ancient dragon-esque iguanas, catching a flourescent, majestic dorado for supper setting up a ‘braai’ on our own island for the night, watching the flaming sun sink down into the ocean on another night in paradise…. These are the memories I’ll carry away from the Bahamas. A magical and largely unspoiled place. A place of dreams and a glimpse of times gone by. 

But it’s time now for even us stragglers to head out of the hurricane zone, leaving behind the grumpy groupers, the lobsters and parrot fish. The turquoise clouds to build up with weather fronts, for mother nature to rip through this chain of paradise for another season… 

We’ll sail out of Port Lucaya, with her blocks of closed up condos, and bid farewell for now to an enigma. The wonderful Bahamas. And off to a whole new adventure – America by sea!

The Long Island Review - a one road adventure

Sitting in the diner with our travel buddies, mulling over my greasy plate of fried eggs, fried sandwich ham and toasted white bread, ‘Let’s Make a Deal’ blaring from the overhead TV with bells and whistles and Americans in Halloween dress up running down the aisles, I pondered that I could be in any small town North America.

But I wasn’t. I was in a roadside café called Swamp Thing on Long Island, Bahamas. You can’t make this stuff up.

We hired our rental car and headed out on our island discovery tour, to discover there is literally one road on Long Island. It’s called The Queens Highway, but its really a one lane barely tarred road in most places. However as there are less than 3000 inhabitants on an 80 mile long island, you don’t often pass another vehicle. There are no traffic jams, not a single traffic light in fact.

There are also not many restaurants serving breakfast, so we discovered. But at the tiny 2 room museum we were told that at Swamp Thing we could rustle some up. We nearly drove by the place as there was no sign – damn, no Swamp Thing sign…. Went in to ask for directions to it, only to be told we’d reached it.

I have to admit, there was nothing ominous about the place, no swamp nearby, nothing in fact to warrant such a name. Just some locals enjoying bowls of boiled chicken in broth (called chicken souse), and bad American game shows that mesmerized the staff. 

Inside SWAMP THING

After brekky we continued the unguided tour, and found church after church after church. We tiptoed around the oldest one on the island, Spanish built and in complete disrepair and found three mysterious grave stones. Then passed the Palestine Baptist Church, a Macedonian Baptist Church and down in Clarence Town we visited the pretty catholic church with the modern art Jesus… 

Modern Art Jesus

The Catholic Church

An abandoned church

Deadman’s is the largest settlement on the island yet we didn’t see a soul. Passing the sign for the ‘Deadman’s Health Clinic’, the irony wasn’t lost on us, we had a great chuckle.

The gem of Long Island though, has to be Dean’s Blue Hole. No idea who Dean is or was, but the hole is a natural phenomena – a frighteningly deep abyss just off the beach in a beautiful bay. We met William Trubridge, the world record free diver who practices here daily, diving down over 100 metres (or 3oo ft) with no gear – no fins, no air… Amazing, but quite scary as well. Hanging over the breathtaking site, a memorial to 3 women who died here on one day in 2008, drowned in the indigo hole…

The blue hole from above - William on the platform

The memorial site at the blue hole

Back along the road what we noticed was what wasn’t there. The place was missing people. Houses upon houses, clinics, churches, abandoned, decaying. And we knew why. Down in ‘Hard Bargain’ (again, can’t make these names up!), there used to be the Diamond Crystal Salt Mines, a huge business that employed so many, allowing the community to flourish with schools and parks and clinics and shops. And then sadly, after just over a decade, the plant closed to due financial troubles at the head office in the states. And in an instant, the prosperity of the island was crippled. The population dropped from near 11,000 to under 3,000. People packed up and left the island, looking for opportunities elsewhere. And what is left is a core group of survivors. Friendly, helpful families whose names are few and recognizable on signs and businesses all along the Queen’s Highway.

Apparently this place is quite lively during cruising season, with a crescendo at regatta time in April before everyone heads back up to the relative safety of the north for hurricane season.

A few expats do remain. Mike at Long Island Breeze Resortand Yacht club, our adopted host was one of them. We latched on to this pretty place, swimming pool, laundry, showers and yummy food were secondary to Mike’s hospitality, piling us into his pick up truck to and from the shops and the farmer’s market, and supplying us with all the inside info about the island.

The only disappointment was Chez Pierre – a French Canadian run, Italian beach side restaurant and chalets that had been recommended on Active Captain. Excitedly we drove down a winding maze of a sandy dirt road to find it, only to be literally dismissed by the owner on arrival. “Hello! Are you open?”

Grunt, sigh (obvious annoyance and disdain) “Yes, but if you have no reservation I can do nothing for you.” And with that he disappeared back through the mosquito screen protected veranda into the bowels of his never-to-be-known establishment.

And that was that. A bitter end to  great adventure on a little known out island.

Despite Pierre, we liked Long Island. We languished in Mike’s pool and licked our fingers after the Philly cheese steak subs at the Long Island breeze on our final night. We dreamt of building little beach huts down in the south where the sand and scenery were unmatched, and we tried to forget our difficult sail halfway through, pounding into 25 knots of wind to get from the south up to Salt Pond.

Chillin' in the Long Island Breeze pool

Ah, the south where the colours are indescribable

The next stop is the Exuma chain, we’re heading into much more chartered territory now, the touristy side of the Bahamas. But we won’t soon forget the quiet charm of these farther places, nor take for granted how lucky we’ve been to visit.

Visiting the Atlantic side at the top of Long Island