Nassau – 15 kilometres walked, 2 miles in dinghy
I despise using the expression “time to kill” but today we actually had time to kill. Our friends Dave and Kira were due to arrive at the marina by around 4:30 and yesterday we had finished all our jobs to prepare for their arrival. So, we went for a walk and found a big production supporting the sailing regatta in Montague – music, vendors, food, drinks. We walked a bit further and found a fish market where all the fishermen were cleaning their catch, bagging up the good parts and selling it to locals, and tossing the skin and innards to the hungry seagulls. We considered picking up some fish, then remembered the beautiful dorado fillets we’d seen in Spanish Wells and decided to wait for those.
We returned to the regatta party for a hot dog and cheese nachos, visited the historical site of Fort Montague (where the historical placards suggested storming the fort and taking it over was as easy as waiting until everybody was asleep), then on the way out of the park I challenged the guard at the entrance to a hurdler’s stretch competition. He won easily, but we will remain good friends.
Back at the boat I tenderized conch and cleaned shrimp for the upcoming paella dinner while Ana worked on some yacht club business. The call from Kira finally came and I whizzed into the dock to pick up our friends. They wore long sleeved shirts (multiple layers), long pants, socks, winter hats, and sported white downy winter skin. They were thrilled to be here and ready for some Bahamian sun.
A bit of background. We first met Dave and Kira while standing in line to pick up our children from junior kindergarten when Magnus was a pudgy, lisping, milk-drinking troublemaker and their daughter Tula was a skinny, gap-toothed fireball. Tula is still a skinny fireball but she has all her teeth now, very nice ones. Dave Hind is a Thingmaker, an artist, a worker of metals, and a musical force. Kira Germann is a cool hippy, a teacher, a hobbyist, and a genius with food. They both love to travel. They both love hanging out. They both love to laugh. We are lucky to call them two of our closest friends and we have spent so many days, evenings, and weekends together over the years that it just made sense to spend a week together in the Bahamas. It’s not easy to find good travel partners so we were thrilled when they decided to visit us.
After a flurry of hugs and kisses I announced we had a surprise for each of them. I reached into the fridge and handed Kira a Life in the Clouds IPA from Collective Arts, her favourite Hamilton brewery, and part of a set of 12 I’d kept refrigerated for five months, patiently awaiting her arrival. For Dave, the plan was to present him with an acoustic guitar, but all my Marketplace messages to locals selling axes went unanswered, so all I could give him was the assurance that I had tried my best, which he was grateful for, but he was just as happy we had a ukulele on board for making sweet music.
While I had been collecting Kira and Dave from the marina, Ana was putting the final touches on the conch and shrimp paella and we ate a delicious meal together in the sunny cockpit as we caught up on news. But we did not linger as we had three venues to visit tonight and time was precious. So, back in the dinghy, back to the marina, back on the pavement, and over the bridge, walking to Paradise Island for our first stop – Atlantis. As we’d become fully locals now, we toured them around, through the marina village, close up to the superyachts, in the casino, past the designer shops, through the tunnels of the Dig aquarium, and into the water park where we found more creatures – sawfish, turtles, sharks, and a serene night scene with perfect lighting, the sounds of waterfalls, and the refreshing tingle of ocean breeze. They loved it.
Next up was a stop at HPOS10i (previously known as Hammerheads, but now under construction and rebranding), the greatest and possibly most underwhelming bar on the planet, at least on first impressions, as the entire building is crumbling apart, there are often rat carcasses rotting on the busted up sidewalks, and the local area is such that you need to get buzzed in after passing a quick visual inspection by the barkeeper. But this is where all worthy Nassau adventures both begin and end.
Alex the owner was on the scene and we introduced him to our friends. I was excited as I had a surprise for him too, a little gift that I’d had Stella dig out of the bottom of our wardrobe at home and send down with Dave and Kira.
“Alex, do you notice anything different about me?” I said as I posed for him suggestively.
“Uh….a haircut?” he stammered.
“Well yes, that too, but notice anything else,” I said as I pulled back my button-up shirt to fully reveal the vintage Hammerheads tshirt beneath it.
“OH MY GOD, is that a Hammerheads shirt?” he burst in astonishment. Alex had been a customer, then server, then manager of Hammerheads back in the day and it’s quite possible we had crossed paths here. But he had not retained any of the classic Hammerheads merchandise.
“It sure is. And you know that saying about a person willing to give the shirt off his back?” I said as I took off the button-up shirt, removed the Hammerheads shirt, then handed it to him.
“What? It’s for me? Are you sure? Do you want to make a trade?” he said as he scanned the 25-year-old shirt, still in remarkably good condition.
“Nope, it’s yours.”
“Get these guys some drinks,” Alex said to the staff as he dashed away, then returned minutes later wearing the Hammerheads tshirt and a huge smile. He then pulled out a very special bottle of Cuban rum, gave us a history of the Bacardi family’s escape from Cuba, the likely location of the traditional yeast used to make the best rum (Alex reckons it never left Cuba), and made Dave a magnificent rum drink.
As is customary, the bar was full of interesting and eclectic people. Alex introduced us to some of his friends and we got into a serious discussion about politics in the Bahamas – the corruption, the illegal immigrants from Haiti, the crime, the lack of opportunities for regular Bahamians, and their perceived downward spiral of the country. We sat and stood in the upper-level treehouse as we talked with these new friends, munching on a platter of grilled chicken, watching the perpetual basketball game happening in the court across the street, the passing traffic, the customers coming and going. Alex is an extremely well read and well spoken dude and he hung with us the entire time.
At 10:45 Ana gave us the signal to make a move to the third stop for the night – the after party at the regatta grounds, which we were told earlier in the day would be going until at least 11. We said goodbye to our new buddies and assured them we’d be back next weekend, then began our walk westward. It was a decently long stroll, but we were buoyed by the Hammerheads beverages, giving us an airy lift and sufficiently blurred vision to Kalik-wash the gritty road, decorated with flattened rodents and lizards.
By the time we arrived at Montague Park the party was over and vendors were mostly packed up. There were no drinks left to be had and no music beyond the strong winds whistling through the palms and echos of machine-gun Bahamian patois bouncing between the vendors. We walked the grounds, joked with a vendor, then turned around and retraced our steps back to the marina where we loaded into the dinghy, explaining the finer points of sketchy late night dinghy manoeuvring, then took off. With the low tide it was possible to shortcut beneath the docks, and when we popped out we were hailed by a wobbly man standing alone at the back of his very large and very new catamaran.
“Nice boat!” I hollered.
“Yeah,” he said, struggling for words, balance, and vision as he seemed to have hit his Kalik limit for the evening.
“It’s huge,” Ana said. “We’re on a 43 Beneteau sailboat.”
“Ah, little boats…they’re so….” he said, searching for words that would not come, then simply hugged himself tightly and looked dreamily up into the air as we motored away waving.
We sketched our way across the bumpy seas to SeaLight, used the safer sea-lion belly slide unloading technique without incident, then recapped the evening’s events in the comfort of the cabin, with water for all except me as I just couldn’t wait to try a margarita with the fancy bottle of tequila they had brought for us.
It was well after real midnight when we finally called it a night. Welcome to Nassau!
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