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Thursday, April 27th - Hope Town, Bahamas
Billowing black clouds
roll by overhead. Thunder booms loudly in the
distance. We are sitting in a protected but very
crowded anchorage in Hope Town, on Elbow Cay. Joe
and the kids just came running back to the boat from
breakfast at Captain Jack's. The temperature has
dropped and a few good gusts have hit us, but no rain
yet. It looks like it won't be as big a squall as
the one I wrote about in our last update, we hope!
We are supposed to head back to Marsh Harbor to pick up
our repaired daggerboard today. It would be nice
to do it before any new storm related damage befalls us!
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In the last week we
have been cruising the Abacos in the company of MIAKODA.
Brian and Jennie Snead, with their twin five year old
girls, Emma and Allie, are fellow Annapolitans. We
actually met them at a party for the Caribbean 1500
rally back during the October boat show in Annapolis.
At that stage, they were still planning a getaway.
They have since bought a boat, sailed it to the Bahamas
from Florida, and extracted themselves from their
businesses and lives back home enough to escape for a
three month trial on the boat. We crossed paths,
literally, as we were entering Marsh Harbor to get ready
for our guests during the second week of the month.
They were on their way out of the harbor and recognized
our boat name. They hailed us on the VHF radio, we
exchanged emails and made plans to hook up later in the
week. We saw them briefly while Hope and Ramin
were with us and meet in Marsh Harbor after we had bid
our guests farewell.
Since then we have
traveled to Green Turtle Cay, Manjack Cay and Elbow Cay,
where Hope Town is located. Green Turtle is a
nicely developed little island with a couple of
"settlements" and some great restaurants and divey bars.
One of our favorites was called Sundowners. It
overlooked the harbor where ZIA was anchored.
There were games laid out on all the tables, a dart
board, a pool table and a fantastic view.
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Best of all was the
target drone they had hanging from the ceiling.
They had found it on a beach five years ago and decided
it would make a great bar decoration. The pizza
was a pretty good version of your standard American pie.
I was dismayed to learn that it was ladies night, from 9
to 11pm. There was not a chance in hell we would
make it to even the beginning of the timeframe!
The owner and his wife, who were serving us, were quite
amused.
There are all sorts of
stories about the folks who originally settled these
islands. Most Bahamians are descendants of slaves
but the people who settled the more remote, outlying
islands are mostly white. They came a hundred and
fifty years ago, or so. Problem is, there wasn't
anyone else here. Consequently, there was a bit of
inbreeding that has led to some genetic abnormalities
among the locals. The owner of Sundowners had a
huge glass eye which could have come from a fishing
accident, for all we knew. Nonetheless, we
couldn't help but think of these strange stories that we
had heard. A boy came into the bar at one point
who was obviously retarded. It is not something we
would have normally noticed, except for these rumors.
Things in Spanish Wells on Eleuthera are supposedly much
more obviously out of whack. We haven't seen that
much evidence to support the stories, except these few
examples. I guess it is in just a few of the
settlements, most of which we have not seen yet, that
the evidence is hard to miss. With the incredible
boom in tourism and the more permanent influx of so many
Americans throughout the Abacos, I am sure these issues
are becoming less of a problem than they might have been
in the past.
The girls also loved
Pineapple's. They had a salt water pool that kept
them entertained for hours. The blackened fish
fingers were awesome. It was just a short dinghy
ride away from where our boat was anchored. Cassie
and Juliana just love being the "big girls" for once.
They have been very good about keeping an eye on the
twins and showing them the ropes. Jennie and Brian
have both commented on how independent and easy going
our girls seem to them. We keep encouraging them
to do whatever it takes to get back out cruising with
their kids. It is a wonderful way to grow up.
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Manjack was lovely and
isolated. The anchorage on the north end of the
island was pretty shallow so there was only one other
boat in there with us. The ocean side beach was
completely deserted and gorgeous. The sound side
beach was virtually the same, although there is more
grass growing on the bottom so the colors are not as
beautiful as the sandy, coral strewn bottoms of the
ocean beaches. We kept up our streak of school
days so we spent the mornings onboard and had the
afternoons for playing in the water and on the beaches.
We shared meals with MIAKODA and got to know each other
a little better. Their boat, a Lagoon 410, is a
totally new boat for them, and Brian is a little nervous
about venturing out for a passage with his young family
on their own. They are hoping to travel south to the
Exumas in our company, and are anxiously awaiting the
successful reinstallation of our daggerboard so that we
can go. In the meantime, Joe and Ramin worked to
help him fix a charging problem between his solar panels
and his batteries one day on Great Guana. Joe has
also hoisted him up the mast to fix a mooring light,
twice. We lent them a spare rudder indicator for
the autopilot, a key instrument which hadn't been
working at all. It took two to install the part so
Jennie and I spent an afternoon with the girls on the
beach while Joe and Brian got the new part installed.
It fixed his problem so he is now able to leave the helm
while underway without veering off course.
What a relief, I am sure. It feels good for us to
be able to help out some folks who are newer to cruising
than we are now. We gained so much out of our
experiences with John and Po Martin on JAIMIE, and
Claude and Rike Dussaud on CENOU, we feel we owe it to
our general cruising karma to return the favor to others
who are living the dream. Plus, kid boats are kid
boats, after all!
As we pulled into Hope
Town, we spotted - actually, you can't miss these guys -
some friends from George Town on their speedy 50 foot
trimaran, P2 or Pi Squared. They also have two,
slightly older, daughters cruising with them.
Since leaving George Town around the same time we did,
they have traveled south to Crooked Island, Turks and
Caicos and the Dominican Republic. They are on
their way back north with a deadline of the end of May
to be in New York for a wedding. Their boat is a
custom-built speed demon. They will spend
the summer in Newfoundland, traveling home by plane to
Austria for a month here and there to keep their kids in
synch with their local school's requirements and to
check in on business. We hope to visit with them
at some point over the winter. It was a
great surprise and quite lucky to run into them here.
As you can imagine, they are hard to keep up with in
their 15 to 20 knot boat. I wish I had a picture
of it for you!
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Yesterday, after a nice
piece of fish for lunch, we took a golf cart out to the
home of a local artist, Ann Corbitt. She moved
here five years ago from her home in Georgia. She
spends nine months of the year down here, volunteering
in all sorts of capacities around the island. She
has a hand in the local church, the writer's circle, the
museum and the library, to name a few. She also
gives free art lessons to both children and adults.
Brian and Jennie had spent a week here earlier in the
year and told us about her. We eagerly signed up
for the experience. The six girls all piled into
the golf cart for the twenty minute ride to Plum Nelly
2, her home on the northwest end of Elbow Cay. We
arrived "early," right on the stroke of 3pm, the
appointed time for the lesson. We caught her in
the middle of cooking a late lunch or an early dinner, I
could never quite figure out which. She managed to
mix in a little cooking lesson with the art lesson and
stories. But the main event of the afternoon was
the stories......
She was drawn to the
Bahamas by an invitation from her sister, who offered up
her beautiful, empty island spread for a relaxing
vacation. So enthralled was she with Elbow Cay,
that she jumped on the opportunity to purchase a nearby
home. The plan was to return to Georgia and sell
her farm so she could move down here semi-permanently.
She eagerly called her sister to share the good news,
"We can finally live in the same town," only to be
broadsided with nebulous comments and outright rudeness.
Her sister and her brother-in-law insisted that she
reconsider. "My sister, who is much fatter and
uglier than I am, didn't want me anywhere near THEIR
island." Well, you can imagine how that went over.
She vacated her sisters' house immediately and went
through with her plans regardless. She managed to
get in many digs against her estranged sibling over the
course of our two hour "art lesson."
The girls did get to
draw and even got a few tips from Miss Ann. She
also drew a couple of lovely portraits of Cassie and
Juliana for us. She understood what she was
dealing with in Cassie immediately. Natasha had
given
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Cassie a few tips on
drawing portraits while they were here and now she was
an expert. You can imagine how this went over with
our new artist friend. She effectively put Cassie
in her place and I was fearful that there would be an
incident, but Cassie sucked it up nicely and decided to
draw a still life instead. Ann was having too much
fun telling stories to teach art anyway. At some
point early in the lesson the bottle of her favorite
liqueur came out ....
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Their mother had passed
away and some lawsuit related to the estate and the "big
fat, mean" sister had finally been settled. "Last
year at this time I was worried about the price of
tomatoes but now I'm rich." Clearly, she relished
the freedom that her newfound wealth afforded her, and
she wasn't afraid to brag about it. She travels
home to her house "On Golden Pond" in Maine for the hot
Bahamian summer months of July through September every
year. She went home for the wedding of one of her
sons, held in the home of the "lemon tart" that was
responsible for her divorce. It was an unhappy
marriage anyway, from which the work required to keep up
the farm in Georgia provided refuge. After all is
said and done, she is happy with her new life. She
has many, many friends here on the island who look out
for her. She was quick to laugh at everything,
from her sister's betrayal to Cassie's cockiness, to her
own quirky personality. She truly loves her life
here. She also talked about the many male friends
she meets and befriends as they pass through Elbow Cay.
It is a small community, and Ann Corbitt's
bigger-than-life personality would be hard to miss, even
for a casual visitor. We left our afternoon "art
lesson" with smiles, bags full of dandelion leaves and
instructions on how to cook them. It only occurred
to us afterwards that she had succeeded in getting us to
weed her yard as her price for the art lesson. It
was a price we were happy to pay!
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The rain is STILL
falling as I finish my update, but we haven't seen any
gusts higher than 30 knots. It is looking less
likely that we will get our daggerboard back this
afternoon, putting off for yet another day our plans to
head south back to the Exumas. Oh well, such is
the life of a cruiser.
All our best,
Christy, Joe, Cassie and Juliana
Next entry
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Many thanks to our
friend Craig Homenko for his assistance in setting up
the website.
We also would like
to thank our buddy Scott Brunner who has been kind
enough to host the website on his server.
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