Cambridge cay, waiting for
weather
Tuesday (3/25/14) morning we
woke up to rain. Later in the morning the rain stops, but the day
continues to be windy and overcast. Too rough for snorkeling
outside our protected harbor. We washed the boat screens and was
amazed how dirty they had gotten. Once they dried, I sprayed them
with a product I picked up in Vero Beach called “Sho Fly” that is
supposed to prevent “no-see'ums” from going through the screens
for up to 6 weeks. No-see'ums seem to like Linda best. I guess they
bite me, but I am too dense to feel them or too grubby to notice. On
Linda they leave small painful welts.
In the afternoon we go for a
hike on Cambridge Cay. We are planning to sail northeast to
Eleuthera, but the wind is coming from that direction, over 20 knots,
making for pretty rough seas on the nose. Since it is a fairly long
passage we decide to wait for better weather.
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| Cambridge Cay Atlantic side |
Wednesday, weather still
sucks. Even though it is 77 degrees 15-20 knot winds can make it
rather cool if you are in the wind long enough. We work on boat
projects and hang out on the boat most the day. Dan and Dawn come
over for movie night. We watched the “Garden of Good and Evil”
which I picked up after we toured Savanna back in November, thinking
some day we would have an opportune time to watch it. Fun seeing the
locations we saw live.
Thursday, this day sucks
even more. A very large Trawler comes into the mooring field and is
having trouble hooking the mooring lines because their bow is very
high off the water. Dan heads over in his dinghy to help hand up the
mooring lines to them and I assist. I swing behind the trawler and
notice the home port on the stern is Shelburne, Vermont. This boat is
huge, not quite a mega-yacht, but a little larger and it would need a
paid crew. If this boat was ever on Lake Champlain I would of
remembered it. Besides the bridge on the trawler is too high to fit
under any bridges over the Champlain Canal. After chatting with them,
I find that the couple that owns the boat bought it at and motored it
from Fort Lauderdale and this is a maiden voyage, with another couple
who are their guests.
I get a chuckle from every
boat we see with a home port like, Golden CO, Bloomfield CO, Denver
CO, etc. on the stern. I think home ports on the stern of a boat
should be were the boat normally resides, not the owner. When I do
get the chance I always ask the owners when was the last time the
boat was in Bloomfield, Colorado, etc.?
Friday morning listening to
Chris Parker (the weather guy on the short wave radio) we find the
weather is going to suck even more, forecast 35-40 knot gusts and
large swells. Going a little stir-crazy we hike over to the ocean
side of Cambridge with soda and snacks and hang out for the
afternoon. Fun looking for and watching blow holes shoot small
geysers up through the porous limestone rock. The waves are quite
impressive, glad we are not out there.
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| Cambridge Cay |
The Saturday forecast looks
like we will have a one day moderation before thunderstorms move in,
in the evening. Winds are shifting to the southeast, for a good
sail. Otherwise we will have to wait another 3 days for settled
conditions.
Eleuthera, Rock Harbor
Saturday morning our window
is still looking good, swells bigger than I would care for, but will
moderate as we get closer to Eleuthera, we leave at 9:00 AM and
Gertie follows. We leave the north cut to the open water and we are
doing almost 9 knots. I think we are going to make great time
getting to Rock Sound, Eleuthera, before it dawns on me that we are
getting flushed out the cut on an ebbing tide. A little further and
we settle down to about 6 knots, still respectable, but closer to the
planned crossing speed. Once we get within range of a cell tower I
email Sandy on Hot Chocolate that we are heading into Rock Harbor in
a couple hours. They had sailed up a few days ago from Cat Island.
We go ashore to check out
the large grocery store, larger than the one at George Town, before
they close and buy a number of items. Sunday nothing is open in most
of the Bahamas. I note that they have lots of ice cream in an open
cooler usually used for frozen meat. It is all soft. I am coming to
the conclusion that stores have ice cream for us North Americans and
much of the local population of African descent are lactose
intolerant and have no interest in ice cream. That's my theory,
anyways, for all the “soft serve” ice cream in warm coolers.
We went out to dinner at
Sammy's, a nice local Bahamian restaurant, with more locals than
sailors. Rock Sound has a nice local feel to it, very friendly
people, people of European descent in the minority. Can't walk very
far without someone offering you a ride in the car. Very friendly
people. Unfortunately the water front docks are in sad shape from
recent hurricanes. Rock Sounds is a little rundown. It's heyday was
back in the 1950's when three wealthy tycoons wintered in South
Eleuthera and brought an economic boom.
“Arthur Vining Davis
entertained such guests as Aristotle Onassis, Yul Brynner and Arnold
Palmer at his Rock Sound Club home. As president of Pan American
Airlines, Juan Trippe transformed the island into a place where the
rich and famous of North America and Europe came to play. The third
entrepreneur Austin Levy, developed the Hatch Bay Dairy Plantation”.
The plantation is long gone, but the silos are still there. I guess he didn't know the
natives were lactose intolerant.
Sunday is Chris Parker's day
off from forecasting, so I sleep in. Later we meet Gertie and Hot
Chocolate at Sammy's for breakfast. After we walk over to “Ocean
Hole Park”, a blue hole about a quarter mile in land from the
ocean. It is a salt water “pond”, 600 feet deep. It looks like
an old quarry, that they stopped pumping the water out of. Lots of
saltwater fish that have found their way in through caves to the
ocean or the locals tossed their parents in. It is a popular swimming
hole for local kids and tourists. A few years ago some local joker
tossed in a live shark for a prank. The local police confined him to
the Park until he removed the shark.
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| Ocean Hole Park |
We were resting in the shade
of the pavilion next to the hole when a bus load of very white, white
guys pulls up. Not your usual vacationers. Turns out they are a
church group from some where in the southern US, here for a week to
do construction work on the church that they sponsor. I guess all
the women folk have to stay home, I don't think they are the “Young
Gay Men Christian Organization”. Anyways, a nice friendly group.
It would be nice if they would come down and work on infrastructure
important to the local economy, like docks and not a place to gather
for a weekly book review.
One of the reasons for the
run down look of the town is the large number of vacant homes, many
vacant for 10, 20 or 30 years and beyond repair. The owners of the
sites have moved on years ago to Nassau or elsewhere. Without
property taxes they have little motivation to sell or desire to come
back. I assume the properties are hard to sell. It would greatly
improve the town to either remove them or fix them up as rental
properties. Some of them could make very nice vacation rental
properties.
Monday is laundry day,
Linda, Dawn and I head to the local laundromat. I leave them there
and head off to do my chores, get more water and install a new fuel
gauge. Later, I go back with the folding cart to take back the clean
clothes and find them about a block from the laundromat struggling to
carry their loads. I put ours and some of Dawns on our cart and then
we head to Sammy's for lunch. Did I tell you we really liked Sammy's,
but you probably figured that out by now. I wonder if we should of
gotten the “meal plan” ? We stop by “Destiny”, an Endeavour
40 from Cape Cod. Bess, who Linda met at the Laundromat had some
stuff called Rust Off. We have been getting rust marks on some of
our clothes that we have been hanging on our life lines and our
usually magic cleaner, Oxy-Clean has not been very effective. This is
not a problem on Lake Champlain, but Stainless Steel is not quite so
stainless on saltwater. Later, Linda is very happy to find “Rust
Off” works great.
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| Tough sail to Governors Harbor |
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| Ladies in waiting at Governors Harbor |
Tuesday (April 1st) we leave by 7:00 AM and head north to Governors Harbor, with Gertie and Hot Chocolate. We are anchored by 10:30 AM and we head in for lunch at the Buccaneer Club.
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| Buccaneer Club |
Nice outdoor deck and we take a table under a large tree, as we are the only ones there. They have chicken on the menu and they also have them live, walking around the deck. Maybe it is like a fine seafood restaurant where you pick your lobster out of the tank. Here you just chase down your chicken. After our late lunch we walk up hill to the middle of the island, which is only about a mile wide at this point. We walked through town and checked out some of the stores.
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| Governors Harbor Library |
The island of Eleuthera is about 120 miles long and generally not much more than a mile or two wide. At one place, called the “Glass Window” it is just 30 feet wide and there is a bridge crossing over it. During one particular storm the bridge actually got moved about 5 feet to the west. I think it is just a single lane bridge, now.
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| Buccaneer Club, breakfast |
Thursday we had a nice sail
to Spanish Wells. Sailed all the way, the last leg under full sail,
near maximum hull speed.
We went for a walk in the evening to find a
place for dinner. We struck out this time and found a place that
truly sucked. Spanish Wells is settled by Europeans and one thing we
learned tonight, don't get traditional Bahamian food made by white
guys/gals.
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| On a run to Spanish Wells |
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| Harbor Spanish Wells |
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| Bill and Dan |
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| Happy Hour with Jean and Tom Goldson |
Later that afternoon we go to the cottage, winter home of Jean and Tom, ex-cruisers that Bill had met a few years ago last time he sailed through Spanish Wells. We have a fun afternoon chatting with them before we head to the “Boatyard”, a new restaurant in Spanish Wells.
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| Sunset at the Shipyard |
There are not many restaurants on Spanish Wells, and none in the league of this one. We had very good dinners and meet up with a whole bunch of other cruisers we have seen in recent weeks.
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| Shipyard parking lot |
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| One car ferry to Eleuthera, run by an Amish gentleman |
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| Saturday evening dining spot |
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| Manana at Spanish Wells |
Spanish Wells owes it's
wealth to Red Lobster. If you get a lobster tail at Red Lobster (not
sure why a New England-er would) it probably came through Spanish
Wells. They have seafood processing plants and do all the packaging
here. Right now they are in the off season so most of the boats are
in port getting ready for the next season. The way they catch
lobsters or crayfish, as they correctly call them, is they make
habitats using corrugated metal sheets, kind of like dog houses that
the lobsters can crawl under for protection. They build these on the
boats and place them in the off season and come back to them during
lobstering season, with the help of their GPS's. Prior to GPS they
had to gather lobsters one at a time, spear fishing. While we were
there many of the fishing boats were loading up the raw materials to
build these habitats out on the Banks. They go quite some distance
and may be out for months at a time from September to March.
Bahamian law allows any Bahamian to take lobsters from these
habitats, in season, if they can find them.
With the development of GPS
and Red Lobster they have become a rather wealthy community. They
even have their own reality TV show, “Bahama Lobster Pirates” on
the sportsmen channel. They have to contend with a lot of off season
non-Bahamian poachers stealing from their habitats that they place on
the bottom. Not, to mention the legal Bahamian “poachers” during
the regular season.
As we leave from our dinner we met Sandi & Isabella driving by in their golf cart coming back from dinner at the “Shipyard”. They pull over and get out and we had another laugh fill gathering with them.
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| Sandy, Happy Fisherwoman |
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| Mahi Mahi dinner on Manana |
Tuesday morning (4/8/14) we leave early for Hope Town. Hoping to get a mooring. Bad weather is forecasted for the next few days and the harbor will be full. A couple other boats, anchored near us, are heading to Hope Town also. Dan quietly comes over early in the dinghy and says we should beat the rest of them out of here, not wanting to tip them off on the public broadcasting system, the VHF.
We wind up leaving about the
same time. One boat, a Catalina 47, immediately runs aground on the
one shallow spot in the anchorage, they will be there for a couple
hours until the rising tide lifts them off. Good, one down. Gertie
is in the lead. There are two boats between us and Gertie. Hot
Chocolate gets a late start taking up the rear. We have pretty good
wind so we motor sail. The boats in front of us all take the deeper
water route around Lubbers Sand Spit into Hope Town I decided to take
the shallower route and save about 4 miles. The lowest point on the
chart is 4.6 at low water. We are at mid-tide, so should be no
problem as longer as I pay attention to our route. Anyways we beat
them all into Hope Town. We grab one of the few remaining moorings
and then scout out another for Gertie. Once Gertie gets in we put
one of our dinghies on a third for Hot Chocolate. The other couple
boats come in and take the last of the moorings further up the creek
in the harbor. Hot Chocolate is happy when they arrive.
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| Hope Town street |
Hope Town is very
picturesque, kind of like a small Cape Cod town with palm trees.
Very colorful pastel cottages, with gingerbread eaves, well
landscaped with picketed fences through out the town. It's a short
walk over to the Atlantic side from the harbor side. Narrow concrete
roads more like wide sidewalks for golf carts and bikes. The small
harbor holds about 70 boats, moorings only. There are a couple
marinas with dockage. At the Harbor Inn we run into “Spindrift”
who we last shared a dock with back near Moorehead City. We have
only heard them on the VHF further south on the ICW. They have been
on the dock here for a month. They had rented storage space to clean
out their boat to have guests stay with them, interesting idea.
Certainly a nice place to park for a month. Only downside is a lot
of growth on the bottom of their boat, which Bob is planning on
removing before they leave and start their trip back to
Massachusetts. They have also met our fellow Vermonters, on “Luna”
who are halfway back to Vermont, by now. Hot Chocolate, Gertie and
us, dinghy over to Captain Jacks on the water for lunch.
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| Dan,Linda,Dawn,Nile,Sandy & Bill |
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| View from Lighthouse |
Linda and I rent bikes for 24 hours and bike to the south end of the island one afternoon and stop at Happy Hour at Sip-Sip for $2.50 Heinekens. The next morning we bike to the northern end, a much shorter ride with Dan on his folding bike. That afternoon we go to a pot-luck with a number of boats that we have been traveling with off and on, Country Dancer, Alice Mae, Milla-Vision (Quebec City, further trip home than us), Gertie, Hot Chocolate and Manana.
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| Pot-luck |
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| Hope Town Harbor |
In the afternoon we walk
through town to the Atlantic side. We stop by the town ball field to
watch kids playing softball. Not quite enough kids for nine players
on each team and an adult is doing the pitching. With only 300 homes
they have a limited pool of youthful players so the ages range from 8
to 16. The girls are bigger than most the boys. Since the field is
right on the ocean, a left field fly ball maybe heading into the
ocean.
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| Bay left, Atlantic right at Man-O-War Cay |
 | |
| Now these are Banker's Hours |
Saturday, Linda and I walk to the north end of the island. At one section, the island is only a road width wide, where you can see the rough Atlantic and the calm Bay side in one glance. The road goes over an ancient coral bed with a little cement for the road surface. I assume this road becomes impassable during storms or at least becomes a salt water car wash. We meet back a Dock n' Dine for lunch with everyone and then we walk over to Island Treats, a real ice cream parlor, for dessert.
Sunday everything is closed,
except the churches and the fuel dock until 1 PM. So I fully fuel up
the boat and fill the water tanks schlepping containers back and
forth in the dinghy. Quiet day, we dinghy around part of the island
in the afternoon and have Gertie and Hot Chocolate over for popcorn
and a movie after dinner.
Monday we head north about 5 miles to Fowl Cay, a preserve with lots of reefs that have excellent snorkeling and diving. A little more wind than we need, so we are are rocking pretty good at the exposed anchorage behind Fowl Cay. Gertie decides to join us and Hot Chocolate heads north to Green Turtle Cay. We pick up Dan and Dawn and dinghy over to Fowl Cay and land on the small beach. After the normal shell searching we get back into the dinghy and motor around to the east side of Fowl Cay where the reefs are.
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| Fowl Cay |
The dinghy mooring that we
saw from Fowl Cay, that was empty now has a large open rental boat on
it. Normally, it is easy to share a mooring with multiple boats when
snorkeling. Unfortunately the clown who rented it with his family
has tied the mooring line to the stern of the boat. Let me correct
that, he has put the loop on the mooring line over the cleat on the
rear. I am not sure he is capable of actually tying a line. Anyways
this open power boat with a very low transom, for the outboard, is
facing stern into the wind and waves, and is taking water over the
transom into the boat. We do share the mooring with him, but it is
awkward. I assume being a rental boat, it has lots of internal
floatation to save the owners investment from neophyte boat renters.
I am visualizing this thing sinking and pulling our dinghy down with
it and our outboard sticking up in the air like a duck feeding off
the bottom. Unfortunately the water is quite stirred up and
visibility is not very good. We try one more site further out, but
visibility is similar. Lots of fish and interest reefs, on a settled
day I could stay here until I reached hypothermia.
After a late lunch back on
the boat we sail up to Great Guana and grab moorings. We walked over
to the Atlantic side to “the world famous Nippers Bar and Grill”
beach bar and the privilege of buying a $6.00 beer. We are not
impressed. We head back and have dinner on the boat after stopping by
Grabbers Bar and Grill on the Bay side, much nicer place to chill
than Nippers, but still $6.00 beers.
Tuesday (4/15/14) we are out
early on our way to Green Turtle Cay. Half way there, we have to go
through the “Whale”. Whale Cay passage forces non-shoal draft
boats out on the ocean when traveling north or south in the
mid-Abacos. Unfavorable weather here and the “Rage” makes it
impassable. High seas, northeasters and distant Atlantic storms
create large swells that create dangerous conditions as the water
piles up on the shallow shoals. Most of the charter companies will
not allow deep draft sailboats to pass through here. Catamarans can
pass on the shallow bayside, so we only see Moorings sail and power
cats here at Green Turtle Cay. For us, today, the conditions are
rather benign and passing through the Whale is a non-event. We are
anchored in White Harbor at Green Turtle by 11:00 AM. We dinghy to
the south end of Green Turtle Cay to the town of New Plymouth another
picturesque town with golf cart wide concrete streets, with pastel
homes and stores. Lots of small restaurants and bars, ah! so many
interesting eateries and so little time.
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| New Plymouth, local ferry |
We are planning on staying
in the harbor for a few days because of squalls and thunderstorms
forecast over the next few days. Those damn Lows coming off the US.
Don't they know winter is over! Stop sending that crap over here.
Time for spring and the easterly trade winds. Since we have been down
here we have been getting a new Low weekly. The wind starts from the
east clocks south, then west then north. When it moves on, the winds
are back out of the east for a day or two, before the cycle starts
again.
This evening a chartered
Moorings power Catamaran comes into the harbor and “anchors”
right in front of us. Obviously they are clueless about anchoring.
Lowering the anchor with 10 feet of chain in 10 feet of water is not
going to work too well. If they were by themselves it would be only
their problem, but in this anchorage with potential squalls in the
forecast the problem is everyones. They can drag and damage our ride
home, their ride is safe at the airport. Boats of knowledgeable
sailors frequently drag in this harbor under squall conditions
because of the poor holding characteristics of this harbor bottom.
They winch up the anchor and motor around trying to figure out what
to do as it is getting dark. I ride over in the dinghy and point out
an empty mooring that is available for $20 a night which is getting
harder to see in the dimming light. Damn, they are French Canadians
(“not that there is anything wrong with that”) who do not speak
English very well. The woman on the bow says they want to anchor and
don't want to pay $20 for the mooring. $3000 weekly charter, plus
airfare and they are concerned about $20 f**king dollars for a good
nights sleep! I go talk with a couple neighboring boats, and then
head back to the power cat after they still have not made any
progress in anchoring and it is now getting dark. They must of
discussed the situation amongst themselves and now agree the mooring
is a good idea, when I go back to them to insist they need to take
the mooring. I tell them I will motor over and hand the mooring
lines up to them when they approach the mooring. At the same time I
get re-enforcements, Bill and Dan motor over. Bill yells up to them
that “they have to take the mooring because they are endangering
everyone else in the anchorage”. We finally get them safely
situated. We have to tell them how to cleat off the mooring lines.
Arg ! Charter boat qualifications, at the Moorings, is apparently
only a VISA card in good standing. Fortunately the potential squalls
do not materialize.
Wednesday Linda and Dawn
head into Green Turtle Marina to do laundry and they later go
shelling along the beach. Dan and I follow them, but wind up at
another beach. As I step on the beach, the first thing I spy is a
“Sea Bean”. What is a “Sea Bean”. “Sea Beans” and
“Hamburgers” are seeds from trees on the west coast of Africa and
elsewhere that have floated across the Atlantic. A “Sea Bean” is
a flat round or heart shaped seed about two inches in diameter. They
are impervious to salt water, even after years floating in the ocean.
I thought someone was pulling my leg, but Google confirmed it.
That evening we all go to
Green Turtle Cay Club for dinner, very good dinner. They have a band
playing after dinner which we get to enjoy back on our boats.
In the morning we head to
Plymouth for breakfast and a hike to some beaches on the southern
side of the island. Before we leave we do some food shopping. I buy
two pounds of frozen conch. Back at the anchorage a Mooring sailing
Catamaran is circling around trying to figure out how to anchor. I
dinghy over and inform them about the moorings available for rent.
They like the idea and again I grab the mooring lines and hand them
up to them. They are from California. We all get another
comfortable nights sleep.
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