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!

A lifetime in a year - lessons in doing without and gaining so much more

The things I’ve learned in one year:

I can live without toasters – if we really need some dried crispy bread, we can throw it under the broiler for a few seconds on each side… sigh too much work. So as I said, I can live without toast. Plus, there's french toast which involves a frying pan and butter... I can DO that!

I can live without a microwave – though reheating leftovers is more of a challenge and more incentive to eat everything on the first night!

I can live without long hot showers – this just makes me appreciate any visit to a marina or trip to visit family. Not sure I could live without a long hot shower FOREVER….

I can live without ironed clothes – if someone hadn’t ironed our clothes for us in Ghana, I’d have discovered this much earlier. Ironing is NOT an essential in my life! Bring on the wrinkles and creases.

I can live without high-heeled shoes – I could barely walk in these on land, now imagine wobbling and crawling in and out of a moving dinghy onto a moving boat or a non-moving jetty. That spells broken ankle. I’ll take flip flops any day. Wouldn’t mind if I never saw a close-toed shoe of any description again in my life. Plus since I spend lots of time on beaches and boats, I can wear my sole-less bead shoes!

I can live without cable TV – provided I can download some good movies from time to time using a good wifi, for those rare quiet evenings on board.

I can live without air-conditioning in 32 degree weather and 90 percent humidity – this is only because I have no choice. But let me tell you, I gasp with pleasure on every shopping trip when we step inside a crisp cool store… ahhhhhh

I love games! – we’ve become hooked on playing a domino game called Mexican Train. I could gather a group every day and play and play. I lose every game which might be why I need to keep playing. Statistically I’d have to win at least once if I kept playing, right? We’ve also been doing a weekly trivia quiz which I love, even though the prize is a bottle of toxic rum punch – made with 70 proof blindness-inducing pure alcohol. Yikes

I need to learn how to provision – It’s impossible for me to hit the grocery store less than twice a week. I can’t imagine buying kilos of rice or flour at once. I buy the small size of everything and wonder why the hell I did that when I wake up to an empty coffee jar and I’m floating out in a bay, that’s a dinghy and bus ride away from any store…

Cruising is a real lifestyle. All around me are people who don’t work in the classical sense – as in, they do not get paid – but whose days are filled from morning to night with chores, jobs, projects. But the upsides are infinite. They travel, they party, they try new things. They sacrifice and compromise on stuff. Things. Irrelevant really, in the big scheme of things. They swim with turtles and sting rays and lie in hammocks under swaying palm trees any day of the week. They might have had no sleep on an overnight passage or a windy, stormy night in the anchorage, but by morning they’ve arrived in a new bay or wake up to a bright warm sunshine.

You DO NOT need a lot of money to be a cruiser. There are boats out here that cost anywhere from USD$20,000 to $2,000,000. People live on budgets of USD$500 to $5,000 a month!!!

What you need to become a cruiser is a leap of faith, a willingness to ‘let go’ – of things and of the everyday ties of family and friends. You need to love freedom and adventure and a few challenges around every corner. The lifestyle gives you lots of pleasure and a fair helping of frustration. Oh, and lots of rum. In the Caribbean that is.

You must not be a planner, as every plan we have, from when to do laundry, to which country to travel to next and when, CHANGES. On a whim. Or during a chat with other cruisers over a game of Mexican Train and a rum punch.

But contrary to what my blog would have you believe, you do NOT have to be an extrovert or big socializer. In fact, many cruisers keep completely to themselves. Some prefer the lapping of the waves to the company of boisterous boaties, and that is perfectly acceptable. Some of us partiers appreciate the down days too!

I never knew how important the weather could be. To be a cruiser, you must be obsessed with the weather. Or at least it helps. Cruisers discuss storms and wind and tropical waves daily. Many times a day. 

We look at this site... alot.

 But if the weather is right, you can find yourself on the full moon, in the evening, rafted up in your dinghy, with 6 or more others, with snacks and drinks, drifting through the anchorage, cajoling the boats as you go, and marveling at the bright glowing orb in the sky. It beats sitting in front of reruns on cable TV, I’ve realised. 

There's the full moon! Just right of the beer...

It’s better than coming home after a stressful day in an office, with recirculated air, feelin frustrated and stagnated… even if you do get caught in the rain or soaked in salt water on your little journey.

I’ve realized I’m in exactly the right spot, even if that spot moves constantly, and knowing there are a million spots to anchor that could take us the rest of our days to discover, I’m in!!!!! 

One of our favourite uninhabited anchorages - Anse La Roche, Carriacou

It's all about your degrees

Wave meets boat. Majestic, omnipotent undulation of ocean meets fiberglass, balsa wood, man made hopeful little craft. It floats. It rocks and twists along. The wave taps, slaps and then it repeats. There are millions before it and after it. And the boat will try with all it’s might – huge canvas sails and little motors, to beat its way across this little section of the mass of ocean surrounding it.

We’ve done three overnight passages, and some day sails. They begin to blend into one memory – the rough seas in the exposed Atlantic stretches, the dead calm and absence of wind on the leaside of each island we pass. I’ve gotten accustomed to tethering in, remembering not to jerk myself backwards as I’m attached to a particular clip and can’t get too far! I know all about sailing meals too – ie water and saltines or a scoffed down apple. It’s okay, the appetite is lulled at sea.

I’m getting into this. When we are an hour or so out of our destination bay I start wishing we could keep going. I wonder how far we could go before I missed land, before I would crave terra firma beneath my feet. I never though this feeling would hit me quite like this, but here I am, over a year of living aboard under my belt, and I am loving sailing. Loving the excitement of the departure from each bay, and the moment when sails are set, and we can cut the motors and feel the wind pick us up and take us along. And the journey begins…It’s like the hokey pokey once you feel it. I’ve jumped in. All limbs in.

Maybe I could cross an ocean like a ‘real sailor’! One day. But for now it’s all about your degrees. In latitude that is. We are one of the many little sailboats, tuned in to radio and internet for weather and wind reports, making the island hops down, down, down – to the ‘safety zone’ – or out of the hurricane belt. The season has begun.

Insurance companies are strict about it and cruisers are pretty serious too, when it comes to where you find yourself in the hurricane season.

12 degrees is the magic number. As we began our southward hopping in Antigua, I noted our GPS coordinates at over 16 degrees. And slowly I’ve been watching that number tick downward, through each trip. There’s been the interim stops in St. Lucia, The Saintes, Martinique, Carriacou, rum squalls with old and new cruiser friends, and finally the chat plotter struck 12. We’ve reached Grenada once again!

Rum squall in St Lucia with junior captain :)

This year we won’t be anchored in place though – we’ll go back up to Carriacou for the regatta and then down to Tobago and finally to Trinidad to eat doubles and rotis, oh, and get some work done on the boat.

Once all that is done, there is adventure. Aruba? Bonaire? Curacao? Maybe the wind will carry us further than we’ve been, but for now, we’ve reached 12 degrees and we are theoretically SAFE.

That’s not to say that we won’t be checking weather and wind forecasts between rum squalls though. This is the cruising life and ‘that’s what it’s all about’.

About travelling in circles

Our head gasket is blown.

Sounds so dramatic. I envision cartoon explosions and resulting water fountains. But in reality we’ve lived with this for the past two weeks, making like all was well with our guests on board, filling the water in the one engine for each trip, then switching that engine off right after leaving the bay and back on again to assist with maneuvering on arrival at a new port.

Between this and our bulkhead coming away from the hull, causing an unsettling rubbing motion in a cupboard, (temporarily fixed by my captain with clothes pegs), we decided we had to head back down to Carriacou for the repair work. And due to timing, for Christmas too.

Some say we are going backwards. This makes me wonder about destinations and goals and ‘keeping up with the mariners’ in our newly chosen life of cruising. It is a phenomenon that cruisers congregate in ‘safe zones’ like Grenada in hurricane season, then head either north or west as soon as November rolls around. And they seem to head out FAST – skipping what are, in my opinion, a lot of great islands and adventures therein.

What direction is right, when we are surrounded by a tropical paradise on all sides and we are not living to anyone’s schedule? Is it human nature to set goals and linear directions, so as to strive toward achievement?

We have definitely tread backward over our blue tracks on the radar/GPS. But then we have done this for weeks, taking visiting guests to islands we loved, places we knew were worth sharing. Each time, through the eyes of someone else, we discovered something new and amazing. Is that backwards?

As we pulled around the jutting rock at the north end of Salt Whistle Bay on the quaint island of Mayreau for the third time in as many weeks, JW and I busied ourselves with the anchoring – searching for sandy patches in the clear water below, assessing the swell in the bay. And then I noticed our guest, like the one before her, standing up front, taking in the beauty before running for her camera. She was in awe. We had brought her to paradise. 

Salt Whistle Bay, Mayreau

 And though we booked lobster supper with Black Boy and Debbie on the beach each time, it was a new experience each time. We were seated at the two picnic tables with different diners from far off places – Sweden, France; new locals with quirky personalities and various techniques for their marriage proposals to our visiting single ladies. We were treated to a new musical serenade for our supper each visit. From Dolly Parton to Euro pop, to reggae Christmas numbers. Each time though, the buttery, garlicy lobster was divine – special to be feasting with our toes in the sand below.

In Canouan, an island run almost entirely by a mysterious company ‘CCA’ who’s vehicles line the dusty goat ridden streets, we discovered only on the third visit, a set of beaches on the windward side, and a little gem of a restaurant. Run by some young Italians, with separate menus for tourists and for workers of the omnipotent company, we managed to wedge our way into their hearts and cheaper set of menus. Surrounded by Romanian, Croatian and Italian men with hearty appetites and boisterous pool games underway, we felt transformed to a different galaxy. A glimpse of another world.

These experiences are what make cruising so intriguing. The smells and sounds of the newly discovered. The promise that you will meet someone new, try a different food, swim at a new beach.

Hiking through the centre of the mystical island of Mustique, I was transformed to a Canadian park in the summer. Acres of manicured park lawns, horse stables and children’s playgrounds. There is no other place in the Caribbean like this.

A tortoise we met on the roads of Mustique

 As we headed through the winding roads, met by many slow moving tortoises just roaming freely, we noticed one striking thing. These were our only friends along the way. Mustique was a ghost town of an island, created as a private retreat for the rich and famous, it doesn’t allow anyone residency unless they buy, or are working in one of the 54 mansions or few tiny exclusive hotels. The result is a spooky quiet that permeates. The houses are set far off the road, behind huge imposing gates.

The main strip, with it’s 4 shops – a bakery, 2 boutiques and a gourmet grocery remind me of a cottage town in Canada as well. Manicured and garbage free for the most part, it’s an example of what the Caribbean could look like with a few clean up crews on duty all the time!

The boutiques on Mustique

 We splurged and ate at Firefly at the top of the hill, Shiloh down below in the distance. I felt like a spoiled elitist, spending crazy money on Perrier and cute food, sitting at an opulent table where Tommy Hilfiger (a resident) and Alicia Keys had been dining a few days earlier.

But I had just as much fun in the streets of Union island at a free local festival celebrating the nine mornings before Christmas.

In a Roots shop on Union's main strip during the night festival

Last night, all the way ‘back’ in Carriacou we joined the barefoot gang of cruisers and a few locals, raising funds to build a new little house for ‘Slow’ – a local character who’d had a mishap with a mosquito coil…. We ate ‘oil down’ from a huge cauldron and washed it down with 5EC rum.

And so we’ve come full circle. From south to north and back south, from the exclusive to the down to earth venues, from one spot of paradise to another.

And no doubt we will head further north, but slowly! And if we decide to sail somewhere we’ve already been, I won’t consider it a backward move. Because our need for a new gasket head brought us back to a family of friends and fun for our first Christmas on Shiloh.