While I have made some effort to catch up on our travels, there are still outstanding chapters to be written. For today, I fast forward to the moment I am writing, March 31, 2019 at approximately 4:05 pm.
I am sitting in the cockpit, drinking a cold, expensivebeer (that’s the way it is here). Today, we did some boat chores in the morning, made bread dough to bake for dinner this evening (thank you, Fuguma, for the recipe), and then inflated our paddleboards for the first time since Anguilla to explore Little Bay, where we are anchored. Anguilla seems a long, long time ago. In fact, it was late January. Since that time, we have been in windy, choppy anchorages, which is not how we use our paddleboards, or in marinas, which I don’t find generally conducive to paddleboarding. So, while we have enjoyed the paddleboards, we have not gotten to use them as much as we would have liked.
We have taken several photos of this anchorage already. It seems the archetypal Bahamas anchorage – perfect white sand, aquamarine water and almost no people. To the west, the sea stretches beyond the horizon, a huge expanse of shallow, beautifully colored water. Just east of our anchorage is the cay, which is narrow and protects the bank from lively ocean seas. For a sailor, it is the best of all worlds, beautiful surroundings, flat water and pleasant breezes. In the distance, I see a boat gliding north with spinnaker flying.
We have not had a single day of sailing on this trip such as I describe now. For example, coming from Turks & Caicos, that old reliable east wind was southeast, right behind us, while swells came from the east. We did anchor in another gorgeous setting, Calabash Bay, on the north tip of the Bahamas’ Long Island at the end of that leg. But the next day, when we could have sailed that southeast wind, it was gone – just flat calm. We had to motor across Exuma Sound to the marina north of Georgetown.
When we left that marina, heading north, the wind was coming from the north. So, we motored to our destination, Musha Cay, which is the central one of David Copperfield’s private enclave of islands. We had a couple of lovely days there. But, when it was time to move on, we had north wind again, and too much of it. Waves crashed over the bow as we motored north. Sound familiar Chesapeake Bay sailors?
Here in Great Guana Cay, we have taken the dinghy ashore and walked to a town called Black Point, the second largest settlement in the Exumas. Towns are not called towns, or villages, or pueblos, or anything like that – they are settlements. I suspect that is a remnant of the days when Loyalists fled the colonies and came to the Bahamas.
The Black Point settlement is “authentic” Bahamian, according to one travel writer. I don’t know how to evaluate that description as I don’t have enough Bahamas experience to say one way or another; I can tell you it has about 200 people, a pathetically understocked food store (the word “grocery” simply cannot be used) and a few restaurants that serve “authentic” Bahamian food. As far as I have been able to tell in the three weeks we have spent in the Bahamas, the authentic diet is fish (likely grouper, which is delicious), conch (lots of it), lobster (I think the locals eat it if they catch it, but not if they have to pay for it) and peas and rice (mostly rice, not many peas, and those are black-eyed peas, by the way). Hamburgers and chicken fingers are on all the menus and we have certainly eaten our fair share of French fries. A lot of these things are deep fried. Yesterday, I tried a lobster burger, which was deep fried lobster (quite good for fried food) and Jae had coconut shrimp. I guess we knew hers would be fried, but I did not expect fried lobster. It seems a travesty.
After lunch, we decided to walk to the local blowhole on the ocean side and then to a nearby beach. The blowhole was interesting but since we arrived at mid-tide, it was not as dramatic as at high tide. Everything here runs on the tides, by the way. The beach was wild, with heavy rollers coming off the sound as a result of the last few days of big winds. We decided not to spread our towel out there, but to retreat to the more placid beach on the bank side.
And here is where the story gets interesting. As we looked down the beach, we thought we saw a path leading back to the road to our anchorage. It looked like a shortcut. We agreed to walk down the beach and explore the shortcut. The sand was soft and our feet sank deep into it. The beach sloped steeply toward the water, so it was quite an effort to walk the length of the beach. When we reached the end, we started down the apparent path. The apparent path quickly petered out and we were staring at Bahamian underbrush with no break in it. We should have turned around right there, but we did not.
At that point, it was about 2 pm. We had left the dinghy on the beach with the tide coming in. I had secured the dinghy with the anchor and a nearby cinder block as added protection for any risk that it might wander away. The tidal range here can be as much as three feet, so we expected it to be afloat when we returned, tugged who knows where by the tide. The forecast called for showers later in the day and we knew strong winds would accompany those squalls.
We started wandering through the scrub in the direction of the road. At first, it was easy, but then the path started becoming less certain. I spied a salt pond and thought we could walk around its edge to get to the road. As we got there, my right foot sank into some muck and I cut my heel on jagged limestone, which is absolutely everywhere. My shoe became bloody. We could walk around part of the salt pond, but part of it was swampy and goopy; our shoes sank in it. Jae suggested we turn around. I demurred, feeling we had come too far and the road was close by. My dear wife, good sport that she is, agreed to keep going.
Once around the salt pond, which fortunately had a lot of limestone rock to walk on, there was no obvious way to the road. Here, the vegetation was much denser and higher. We plunged into it. Quickly we discovered a variety of shrubs, some more friendly than others. Low lying palms were our friends because they created a space you could walk around. Limestone rock was our friend too because nothing could grow under it. In between were enemies. In particular, a very thin, stringy vine with thorns that had the tenacity of barbed wire.
We were not dressed for this type of safari. I had on a pair of very light shorts that are supposed to dry quickly if they get wet and a T-shirt to match. I can tell you they tear when exposed to vines. I had sandals and a hat. Jae was dressed similarly. We had not thought to bring machetes, scythes, chainsaws and other important ground clearing equipment with us. We did not even have pruning shears.
We continued breaking through this brush and here the male stubbornness bloomed in a way that all can recognize. Jae suggested again we turn around, which meant walking back through some of the brush, around the salt pond again, down to the beach and around to the road. Looking down at my bleeding legs, I refused to turn back, believing the road was close by.
For confirmation, I pulled out my cellphone and consulted Google Maps. It did show our location relative to the road, but I could hardly see it because I was wearing prescription sunglasses in the bright sun and it washed out the road on the phone’s screen. Of course, I could have removed the glasses, but then I would not be able to see anything on the phone’s screen. Meanwhile, time marched on and every time I consulted the phone, I could see we had only made incremental progress while time was passing. No one knew where we were and we could not have described it to anyone, except by latitude and longitude coordinates, which I suppose is better than nothing. There was no more talk of turning back.
I went first, breaking trail and trying to stamp down vines to make it easier for both of us to pass. Jae followed, quietly. At one point, I determined we were going parallel to the road. We adjusted course. We saw power lines that we knew ran along the road. We aimed for the nearest pole, but it seemed maddeningly far away. Three o’clock came and went. We hardly seemed closer to the road. We thrashed through the brush with a quiet determination. Jae later told me she started to worry about being out there in the dark. Both of us worried about bugs or larger critters, but did not express those fears to each other. I wondered about feral pigs or boars. Jae wondered about snakes. Every time I consulted the phone, I was aware of the time, now 3:30. I knew the sun would set after 7 pm, so we had plenty of daylight, but I started worrying the dinghy might float away in the high tide if we did not get to the beach soon.
Eventually, a pole seemed right in front of us, but the densest brush appeared to lie between it and us. I wanted to tear through without regard to further cuts and scratches. Jae suggested we dogleg around to the left, which was a great idea and we soon burst out on the road, relieved for the end of our ordeal. We no longer had to worry about calling in our GPS coordinates for Bahamas Air Search and Rescue and becoming the butt of all cruisers’ jokes. We inspected each others’ wounds and used what water we had to rinse some blood off. We still had over a mile to walk to the beach.
Once on the boat, we stripped, bathed our wounds first in salt water, and then in fresh water. I covered my legs in Neosporin and laid out in the cockpit, drinking rum and being grateful to be back aboard.
After the rum had started to take hold, and my legs were no longer my main point of awareness, I confessed to Jae my stupidity about pushing on. She disagreed that it was stupid, saying only that I was too stubborn. Much as I appreciate her kind words, she is wrong. Pressing on was plain stupid.
She describes the wounds on our legs as constellations like we see in the sky at night. In some areas, there are only stars, pinpricks of red where thorns stabbed one of us, while in other places, just as in a constellation, the pinpricks are joined in a straight red line, as if the gods drew Orion’s belt in the night sky. (There is a picture below if you have a strong stomach.)
Is it any wonder that Jae is ready to come back ashore?