Winter in Bahamas

Skinwalker Log, February 2, 2010, Tuesday, 0630 hrs

Boat Harbour, Marsh Harbour, Abaco, Bahama

Some may say, after this log, that I don’t like winter in the Bahamas.  Not true.  

Tom Conrad, a fellow scribbler, brings it close to the truth, with understatement, as he admits his expectations were not the same as the reality.  Tom sees the good in everything.  The next time we meet I will remind him that angst is the seed of literature.

I believe a bit of enlargement pushes a yarn along.  But in this log to prevent damage to others’ expectations, hyperbole perhaps should be hobbled.  This log should be a factual narrative like weather reports or world news.  Well, maybe not the news. News is historical after all and only the survivors write history.  Come to think of it, news readers are pretty good at taking a circle of facts and with a practiced twist make a pretzel, still the truth, but different.  So it is with the Bahamas. 

This archipelago of islands tricks you with its stunning variations of water color and gorgeous sand beaches fringed with sets of coconut palms and scrubby mangroves. The many hues, shapes and sizes of reef fish are exciting and the local cuisine differs enough to elicit interest, but same enough to enjoy.  So what is the problem and how can I justify whining that perfection is not perfect?

I hasten to remind all that I am an Arizona boy, and a Florida resident and, quite frankly, I don’t do cold.  Never have and never hope to embrace the weather systems that bring the cold.  Besides, if I enjoyed cold I would be with my ex-wife.  Now there is cold.  She was so cold I wore insulated pajamas to bed to prevent freezer burn. Yes, I know cold.  Cold is when you can’t pee in the woods without fear of losing body parts.  Cold is when you can’t make love in a field with, oh, never mind.

The wind blows in the Bahamas, sometimes less than others.  But almost always it blows and blows.  There have been five days in two months that the wind did not blow.  We are not sailboat people.  We like them well enough, but we do trawlers--don’t need and don’t want the wind.  Wind makes waves.  Sometimes wind moves boats not so well anchored in the shallow sands of the Abacos.  That is no fun.

The water is cold.  Even with a wet suit the water is cold after the first few cold fronts.  It takes effort to enjoy snorkeling when the water is cold.  You have to want it to spend an hour in the water.  On occasion, the water will warm enough to enjoy a day, but be mindful and ready to go.

We are staying in one of the largest marinas in the Bahamas.  The resort is simply beautiful, with heated pool, tennis courts, beach, fine dining, all nestled in lush landscape in a keen locale.  It could be a resort in any southern beach town in the US, which is part of the problem; we are in the Bahamas.  While a wonderful place, there are so many North Americans here that it doesn’t feel Bahamian.  Marsh Harbour loses some of its charm by being a primary supply hub for the family islands in the Abacos and so follows Boat Harbour Marina, too big and too busy to properly exhibit that delightful syrupy slowness, that laid back attitude which prevails in armchair musing of the Bahamas.

I am not a group person--big surprise there.  Boat Harbour is for people who enjoy group activities of every ilk.  Yes, you can enjoy other couples in more intimate settings, but there is always significant pressure to be a member of the larger group events.  It is easy to relegate ones self to outcast status.  There is a balance each person must find and hold close on the social titter-totter.  

Aw, but the real Bahamas is only a scratch away.  The water may still be cool, the breeze a bit brisk and anchoring indeed can pose its challenges, but the Bahamas are what they are and once understood you file your expectations and enjoy what is offered.  Part of that offering is the tiki bars—another big surprise, yes?

I enjoy Saturday, steak night at the Jib Room in Marsh Harbour and listening to subtle Bahamian melodies such as “Who Put the Pepper in the Vasoline” best performed by a Rake n’ Scrape duo.  That a person occasionally falls off a dock or down on the dance floor isn’t a problem.  The challenge is not to step on them while dancing or allowing them to sleep in the water.

I love the Sunday afternoon pig roast at Nippers on Guana Cay.  The food is Bahamian, the Frozen Nipper strong, the bikinis enticing and the crowd noisy. 

Grabbers nestled in the palms down the hill is set on a Polynesian-like lagoon that is postcard picture perfect and a nice respite from the rancor at Nippers.

Elbow Cay offers Captain Jacks that hangs over the Hope Town harbour.  The small, protected mooring field is studded with cruising boats loosely packed as sardines. The red striped lighthouse on the hill maintains a one-eyed vigil over it all.  Sea Spray Marina is down island from Hope Town.

Down south is Pete’s Pub in Little Harbour.  It can be treacherous in some regards to get there.  But you pick a good day and go.  Pete’s I hold dear.  An overhead deck is the roof for this wall-less bar, the floor nothing more than a sand beach that trickles down to the water’s edge.  Oddly it reminds me of a lonely Mexican Cantina in the middle of a Milagro bean field.  It is comfortable, local and quiet.  Don’t beach your dinghy at high tide.  You know what I mean?  They serve Blasters here.  Make sure your dinghy knows how to get back to the mother ship before getting Blasted.

Oh, there is so much more than the tiki bars to explore yet they seem to be a part of each day whether you are snorkeling an inner reef, making your way through the shallow tidal flows of Old Robinson Bight, diving for conch off Johnny’s Key, searching the grass edges for lobster condos, or fishing a pass.

It is expensive to enjoy the offerings of the tiki huts.  Bar food sandwiches range mostly from twelve to eighteen dollars and drinks seven to ten dollars each—rather like New York City.  But there is nothing to do for it, so after a while you simply spend the money.  Wiling the afternoon away can easily lighten our load by a hundred dollar bill, so we pace such events as we can. 

The wind will moderate for the next couple of days allowing us to explore either by dinghy or mother ship or both.  We look forward to a bit of adventure away from the marina. 

I do like the Bahamas with its isolated places along the road less traveled and it exceeds my expectations in that regard.  When the wind holds us captive we cannot explore nearly as often as desired.  The cool curtails daily underwater curiosity.  Yet, the ripe roundness of the conch horn sounding each day home leaves a mellow contentment to settle over us, a feeling that is uniquely Bahamian.

Tomorrow we taste more of the Bahamas.  I think Man-o-War Cay.

Bones

 

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Consulting my personal A.D.D

NOTE:  This was a personal email to Friend Fred Meyers who among many accomplishments wrote and published cruising guides on the Tombigbee, Tennessee, and the Cumberland Rivers.  This personal email during construction morphed into whatever it is now.  I am sorry Fred, but it simply took off, got out of control and took a hard jog to avoided sublime and ensure the ridiculous.  You of all people should understand how this can happen and how it blindly takes us to unknown spaces.

Dear Editor Fred,

How are you my friend? How good to read from you.  You’re right, I have not been writing on the book as diligently as we had previously discussed.

Soon, I hope, writing chapters instead of stuffing the email eggplant with filler will be the order of the morning. You are correct, Baltimore pirating with all the pretty horses is a massive distraction.  Course the Bahamas has its own way of claiming attention.  I now understand and pity the child with Attention Deficit Disorder.

(a few minute pause thinking about how one might get distracted)

I was just consulting my personal A.D.D. inside me where it resides, roams freely and continues to be an acquaintance of mine.  I have concluded there is a positive side of A.D.D. and upon a more intimate review, I discovered some odd yet undeniable facts.   When you spend a little time on it, there may be more good than bad, and have you ever noticed it is only males who are so categorized.   Wow.  I think I’m on to something here.  If a male child cannot stay focused and on task for very long he may be considered having a deficit condition.  If it is a young girl the behavior is defined as a primary learning tool for a lifelong adventure in multi-tasking.  If male and in your sixties and exhibit the same behavior your retired and having way too much fun or as Lynn likes to explain it about me , “…he has simply failed to grow-up…”.  Adult women mask the scourge of flight hither and yon by insisting: “well, someone has to do the work around here”.  How do they get away with that stuff? Oh, yeah, I temporarily lost my senses, women are always right.  How could I have forgotten?

I submit to you that A.D.D. is an excellent development tool that sets up young men to be aggressively curious and causes them to stick their fingers in so many pies that sooner or later they will pull out a plum they find so delicious they decide to mine that fruit for all its worth.

In fact I bet that is how you got to be my editor and I am happy for your opportunity to bake up a sinfully good experience for all to sample.  A collection of musings hot and sweet yet hints of tartness with full-bodied taste on the front end that slims to a fairly light aftertaste drawing you back to the fruit for another taste.  (Barf, I’m gagging)

Because of the delicacy of this half-baked wonder, you could not possibly abuse this fruit by canning it, could you now?

Oh, by the way, did I tell you about the Conch Salad they have here?  Today’s adventure will be searching not for the lost shaker of salt, although that is a continuing theme, but seeking the perfectly shaped full-lipped conch with color shading to a ruddy pink interior.  Fortunately Conch do not, as a rule, have A.D.D.  Can’t you just imagine this huge snail hauling his conch butt across the Sea of Abaco with this big sand trail rooster tailing up behind him or streaking through the sea grass on the bottom with his tail on fire, flames streaming behind him or would it only be steam? 

Soon as we find the conch, mon, we be off seeking the big bug lobster.  Not sure when, but I promise to send you the next chapter real soon.  Hey, look.  Is that a school of snapper hanging under the boat?  Editor Dude, I got to go, there are things that need doing. 

Bones

Getting to the Bahamas

I am sitting here at one of the Abaco Beach Resort & Marina swimming pools.  I am patiently waiting for the bar in the middle of the pool to open.  I don’t think it opens until 0700 hrs.  But I am, as suggested, a patient man when waiting for rum.  I smell the cook house.  It smells good, but I do not smell the rum, so I wait.  In fact there was a party here last night with two-for-one drinks.  The place, of course, was flooded with cruisers.  So many cruisers it took me 20 minutes to get my two expensive rum punches and then I forgot to get Lynn’s wine.  Patience is a virtue and a hell of a lot easier when I have rum punch in each hand.  I went back for her wine, very happy to wait.

This week I have been fearful of just about everything.  Nervous about our crossings of Okeechobee, the Gulf Stream, Little Abaco Bank and crossing from island to island in the Sea of Abaco in our dinghy and concerned about anchoring and the mooring ball and afraid of getting lost again in the dinghy in the night after several Sundowners, a rum drink.  Never mind that I got lost at Green Turtle Cay between Settlement Point and Black Sound entrance, a matter of a 100 yards or so in a straight line.  Few would understand that challenge unless they had several Sundowners also, which is why Lynn didn’t even know we were lost I suspect. 

I have been frightened of everything except my morning coffee.  Then the day before we left for the Bahamas the darn cup full of coffee took a running jump at my computer and did a cannonball in the middle of the keyboard.  I sat transfixed as the coffee, in slow motion, wobbled to the edge of the cup then concentrated all its energy back to the middle of the cup and exploded up and outward in a starburst of smoothness that then descended on to the keyboard several feet to starboard. Every key, except “Esc” and “Control”, held an opaque, golden tan pool of former goodness.  It is odd that those keys were spared, since I couldn’t escape and had no control of anything.   If I could drown in a cup of water (I haven’t yet, which is why avoid water and stick to rum), I guess it is reasonable to understand the demise of my computer in a partial cup of coffee.  Father Phil of Curmugeon, a computer security pro, is currently performing the post-mortem.  So, now I even fear my coffee.

It started last Monday.  (Oh crap, a coconut just landed next to me and scared it out of me.  Hmm, I should put lime in da coconut ‘n shake it all up.  I’m beginning to like this place).  As I was saying, last Monday 0’ dark thirty, we were in Stuart, Florida staged and ready to depart for the Bahamas.  The day before we had scouted the pass from the ICW to the St. Lucie outer marker.  Piece of cake. 

We were up at 0330 and underweigh using our computer cookie trails from the day before to help guide us out channel across the ICW and out the pass.  To be candid it was a darn sight easier the day before in the daylight.  As we departed Manatee Pocket, I suddenly switched into panic attack function (OMG), where up is down and down is sideways and radar is wrong and the course line doesn’t stay under the little ship-like cursor of my charting system.  Lynn sensed my disoriented state and stepped up or perhaps sidestepped into her Zen mode as she stood outside with million candle power beam seeking out our next mark, secure in her ability, and confidently, in a calm knowing voice, guided me ever so nicely out of the channel and on to a mud flat.  But at least she did it with panache and it was skillfully accomplished.  I was very impressed.  We got to the outer marker at about the same time we would have if we had left at first light, but who cares. Really, it is the adventure that counts.  Yeah, right.

Now for those of you that have made this crossing you know all the feelings and the wonders it provides so you may want to move on to another person’s blog, but for those who have not done this or simply want the visual of my green pants turning brown stick around.  I can only revert to one of my pirate crews’ text expressions: OMG,or Oh..MY…GOD….  In my case it is often interchangeable with OS or Oh, Sh-t!

As we cleared the St Lucie outer marker we turned 45 degrees south for a 16 mile jaunt down and out to the Gulf Stream rather then head due east to the stream only 10 miles off-shore.  We do this because, as our boating friends know, the Gulf Stream runs 2-4 knots north and, hence, rather than fight it the whole way across we can go south before we get to it then point straight east and end up in the right spot due to the current pushing us north as we motor east across the stream. (Deedra forget it.  Its not that important.)

Being a Nervous Nelly and knowing the fickleness of the Stream and the capricious weather of the Florida Strait we choose weather like elves choose cookies.  Both must be uncommonly good.  For us a crossing, any crossing (except crossing a Street to a bar) forecast, must be 2’ or less for the seas and under 10 kts for the wind, and, oh yes, it must be out of the south for this crossing to prevent beating against the standing waves created from wind blowing against current.  We like this very conservative forecast because, most of the time, just when you get to depend on a forecast being accurate, it is OMG/OS much worse and you die or at least wish you had.  This day we were lucky, the seas are as forecasted and the sun spun up once again and turned the calmish seas the color of a peeled blood orange after the first bite.

So the Gulf Stream is really a river in the ocean which doesn’t make a lot of sense until you get to there, because that is exactly what you see - a river in the ocean.  We got to the edge of the Gulf Stream and it was as if we were standing on the shore at the river’s edge.  OMG.  There was a line of color change, but more so a distinct change in the water shape.  The wind blowing out of the south was going with the stream and this day the water in the Gulf Stream river was flat and so where a few yards before it was rougher and ruffled from the 5 mph breeze it was calm and flat in the river and the color, the color I have never seen before in nature.  It was a rich, creamy, cobalt blue with endlessness to the colors depth that said,  “I am deep, I am strong, I am the Gulf Stream”. 

The Stream itself only takes us about six hours to cross from Florida to the Little Bahamas Bank.  We knew that when we crossed onto the Bank we would have a depth change from 2,000 ft depth to 13-foot depth.  OMG, we didn’t know it was going to happen in about one boat length.  As we approached the bank we could see it by the color change about a mile away.  As we crossed on to the bank the depth went so very quickly from 2,000 to 300 ft and then it seems like in one boat length we went from the color of deep space Cobalt blue to the sharpest, brightest, purist Arizona turquoise that we have ever seen.  It was brilliant, almost blinding, as we skittered across into 13 foot of water of the White Sand Ridge onto the Bank.

We trudged on across the bank for 25 miles and as the earth churned the sun into a hot buttery set we dropped anchor and enjoyed the solitude and the quiet  contrast of sunset and darkening azure six inch seas—in the middle of the Little Bahama Bank--aka nowhere.  Nowhere was the perfect anchorage this evening as a full moon towed by the sun on a long leash shed its grace on Skinwalker.   We have arrived in Paradise—now where are those 72 virgins we have heard about so much lately?

Being a master of a pirate ship

Friends,

Many people do not understand why I enjoy being the Master of the FEARLESS the Urban Pirate Ship in Baltimore.  I don't truly understand it myself, therefore one day I held a "focus group" of natives in a one on one and group meetings to help me come up with the hard answers.

Bones

 

Loving my life: Music, manatees, and phosphorescence

To the sounds of a DJ playing spinning 60’s tunes the sun is steadily tugging cover of night from the east over the SKINWALKER.  There is a seriously overweight manatee floating in peaceful slumber 50 foot from the boat bobbing like a gray cork in the Manatee Cove Marina basin.  Once every few minutes it slow raises its ugly head exposing his nose to breath and more frequently raises its tail to pass gas.  Have you ever in your life encountered a worse scent than a manatee fart?  Three tight body soldiers, female, tight jeans, tight shirts, head for the tiki bar to pick up a man for the night or perhaps longer.  An unknown group is covering “I can’t help falling in love”, while two airmen attempt to sing along.  An enlisted Mom in uniform escorts her two kids along the dock.  Two staff Sergeants un-tip two plastic pipe chairs and pull them up to the plastic table to the threads of a Hawaiian slide guitar piece while the wind complains moderately overhead.  The manatee farts again and the very slight current slowly draws the sleepy creature closer to our boat.  It is 76.6 degrees and the low puffy clouds explain the barometer is rising.  The slide guitar morphs into a quick island tune with the steel drums attempting to keep up with the fast paced vocals of a Jam’ mon.  Forest fatigues flood the tiki hut and a girl with huge breast and a tight knit V tee draws their attention as she walks up—with a guy.  I can almost hear the disappointed groans wrenched from the fatigues of whom most will not get laid tonight.  The DJ sits stoic, bored with his sloppy and ill-prepared set of ancient music nobody really cares much about except those already drunk. Big breasts and her beau come by and chat up Lynn, who is sitting on the back deck, as the band in the box sputters out a medley of old Christian tunes promising this Little Light of Mine, Swing Lo Sweet Chariot, The River is Deep and Wide and others.  The DJ’s play list is eclectic if nothing else.

Tonight the water will sparkle with phosphorescence as I urinate into it or a mullet jumps or the manatee farts sending up a mass of bubbles that excite the creatures that glow.  I sneer in disgust, yet happy for the manatee in that its flatulence excites something.  Red, Red Wine accompanies the slow sensuous bootie rhythm as a woman moves it gently back up against a sergeant that pretends to ignore her.  Jimmy Buffet laments his lost shaker of salt followed by Eilene Quinn doing an unorthodox version of What do You do With a Drunken Sailor.

Hot damn, I love my life,

Bones