Staniel Cay – 5 miles in dinghy, 2 kilometres walked, 500 metres snorkelled
The Staniel Cay Yacht Club was packed. We had claimed the last three stools around the bar and all the tables in the restaurant and lounge areas were full. It felt like a Friday in the regular world, but here? Tuesday.
The bar was square shaped, staff behind the bar were roundish, and the patrons were a delectable assortment of rail thin sailors, uniformed superyacht crew, well-muscled American Hulksters and their surgically enhanced partners, dreadlocked vagabonds, boutique resort tourists, and us, who others may have described as standard issue Canadian cruisers, but I would call us undercover social scientists as we scanned the faces and bodies of the people gathered, guessing their histories and motivations, on the sly.
Ana took a sip from her bottle and said, “I love these Sands Radlers. They’re way better than the Kalik ones. Those have a funny aftertaste.”
“You mean that little metallic zing you feel after every sip,” I said, sipping my Kalik and experiencing a little metallic zing.
“Yeah, that’s exactly it. What is that, anyway? It’s gross.”
“That’s the crazy you’re tasting. The crazy they put in the Kalik.”
She looked at me with her eyebrows raised in a doubtful fashion, a look I’ve become accustomed to over the years. Stella leaned back on her stool, waiting for what might come next. I continued.
“Have you ever heard of the Greek hero Achilles and his mighty spear? Well, after the death of Achilles and the subsequent fall of Troy, a Greek army slave named Gerry Kalik, under the cover of night, creeped out onto the blood-soaked battlefield plain, found the sacred spear of Achilles, and hid it in one of the ships. He survived the campaign and eventually made it back to Greece, gained his freedom, and took the spear with him as he travelled the globe, on his own adventures.” I paused to take a sip of my Kalik, in a dramatic fashion, then continued. “Gerry Kalik, through a series of misadventures, wound up shipwrecked in Nassau and was down to nothing but his loincloth, a parchment scroll inked with an ancient beer recipe he had stolen from a wandering monk back in Constantinople, and the spear of Achilles, which he had cleverly disguised as a walking stick. There, Gerry took up a new career – pirating – but during his weekends off and public holidays he made beer using the recipe but added a secret ingredient. Within each bottle of beer, which came to be known as Kalik, he would add the tiniest of shavings from Achilles’ mighty spear. These shavings acted as a powerful addictive agent, but more importantly, would consistently produce berserker behavior in those that consumed enough of it, typically seven bottles. Gerry Kalik was himself killed in a brawl right here in Staniel Cay after a bunch of his fellow pirating crew got into the Kalik kegs stored in the bowels of the ship and went crazy – burning, stabbing, slashing, pulverizing, and bashing everything and everyone on the island. None survived, but Gerry had wisely provided his sons with a map to where he had buried a chest containing the beer recipe and precise instructions for taking scrapings from the spear, which was now disguised as a coat rack in the family home. The Kalik descendants have carried on this tradition since then and that, my dear, is the origin of the unusual metallic zing you get after taking a sip of Kalik and why I barely survived my own time here in the Bahamas in my 20’s.”Ana looked at me and said, “What happens when the spear runs out? It can’t last forever.”
“Gerry also stole Odysseus’ war girdle. It supposedly had the same properties and is still buried in Nassau somewhere,” I said, taking another sip of my Kalik and feeling a great surge of creative storytelling.
“I’ll stick with the Sands Radler.”
“How many Kalik have you drank during this trip, Dad?” Stella asked.
“Uh, maybe 10?” I said nervously.
“At least 20,” Stella said.
“Way more than 30,” Ana added.
After a little mental arithmetic and taking another sip of my Kalik I said, “That’s probably right, but as I’m now older and wiser, I’ve been careful to spread them out evenly and not drink too many at once, otherwise SeaLight and me might be lodged in the bottom of the sea and you two would be floating towards Cuba in the dinghy.”
It had been a day of boat chores and a little bit of fun. I started the day by taking the bottle of Barkeepers Friend, a toothbrush, and a pail of fresh water and scrubbing off all the rust I could find growing on the stainless steel throughout the exterior of the boat. Next, I took the dinghy over to White Seal, had a cup of tea with Malakai and Mary, then helped them with troubleshooting a cranky engine vibration problem. We removed the spent anode from the propellor shaft, which may or may not have been contributing to the problem, but they were going to monitor the engine performance to see if it made a difference, then replace the anode.
Once the girls were ready, the three of us took the dinghy into Staniel Cay and went for a walk, stopping at the grocery store along the way and finding a severely depleted inventory, getting our propane tank refilled, then ending up at the Flying Pig café for a lunch of Chicken in Da Bag for me (just a fried chicken thigh and fries, no bag) and tuna melts for the ladies. We returned to the yacht club to watch the nurse sharks for a while and today there must have been thirty of them.
We did a couple more small boat jobs back on SeaLight, including cleaning out the composting toilet (one of my favourites) then the girls got busy with trying to find Stella the best deal on a new phone, applying for summer jobs, and Ana did some Newport stuff while I went spearfishing. I bagged two reef fish today – another squirrelfish and a Blue Runner, taken from reefs out near the ocean cut which was manageable with the slack tide. On the way back I stopped at the Grotto for a little snorkelling and found myself within the cavern completely alone. It was admittedly a little spooky, but I enjoyed it. I was surprised to see very few fish there, then I remembered an incident the day before. After Stella and I had snorkelled in the Grotto and around the island and were back in the dinghy, a boisterous American fellow swam up to us, then stood up in the shallow water, exposing his red, white, and blue swimming shorts, and started talking.
“You guys like the Grotto?”
“Yeah, it’s amazing,” I answered.
“Did you see all the fish?” he asked excitedly.
“Sure did.”
“You want to know the secret to seeing even more fish?”
Stella looked at me, I looked at her, then we both looked at him.
“What’s the secret?” Stella asked.
“Squeeze cheese,” he said confidently. “You take a can of pressurized cheese in there with you and spray it underwater.”
“You shoot that toxic, foul, nasty, revolting spray cheese in the pristine Grotto water?” I asked.
“You bet. Gone through four cans already. The fish love it! Well, see y’all later,” he said as he turned and shuffled through the shallows towards his dinghy – the one with the 40 horsepower engine.
So it seemed The Great Squeeze Cheese Grotto Massacre of 2025 had wiped out the local fish population. Hopefully new ones come back someday.
We finished our evening by stapling what remained of our wind-beaten Newport Yacht Club burgee to a rare available spot on one of the rafters in the Staniel Cay Yacht Club, thereby cementing our incredible time and experiences here for perpetuity, or at least until the rest of the burgee disintegrated.
No comments:
Post a Comment