Marsh Harbour to Great Guana Cay – 15 nautical miles sailed, 5 miles in dinghy, 4 kilometres walked, 1 kilometre swam
Cruisers Net is an informal and local system of communication done between cruising boaters through the VHF radio. There is a famous Cruisers Net that runs out of Gore Bay in the North Channel of Lake Huron and I believe that was the first one we ever heard, but there are at least two of them in the Bahamas that we’ve heard – one out of Georgetown, Exuma and one here in Marsh Harbour.
The broadcast runs daily from Monday to Saturday and it always follows the same format. There is a single person who moderates the broadcast and they begin it at 8:15 on VHF channel 68. After a brief welcome and opening comments, they begin the broadcast with the low and high tide times and the weather forecast. Next, they ask for reports from any boaters in or in view of the three main ocean cuts leading into and out of the Abacos, to let other cruisers know if it is safe to transit these cuts. Then comes a segment for community news where any local events of interest to visitors are noted - things such as sailing races, fundraisers, dances, concerts, and cultural events. Following this is an open forum where anybody can pose questions to the cruising community, ask or offer advice, propose ideas, look for buddy boats, and so on. Finally, the broadcast ends with arrivals and departures, where vessels on the move report their movements.
It is a really cool system, all volunteer-based, and of great use and interest to cruisers, especially new cruisers like us who always have lots of questions. We were mainly interested today in knowing what the conditions at the Whale Cut would be like as we were hoping to transit it to get to the northern Abaco islands. Today, opinions varied. The moderator thought there might be an opportunity to sneak through, but I was surprised as strong north winds had been blowing which builds huge swells that take a time to come down, and it was still blowing at 15 knots from the north. Another boater said his weather app was reporting five to seven foot swells so he recommended avoiding the cut. Then, some a-hole that didn’t feel the need to identify himself, screamed into the VHF, “You fucking pussy!”
That came as a surprise, as the whole thing had been so orderly and polite up until that point. The vulgarist was roundly ignored and the broadcast carried on as if the brief message from today’s show sponsor had not happened, so I am guessing it’s not the first time this sort of things has occurred. Not all boaters are as classy as those travelling on Waddington, Domino, and SeaLight.
We sailed ten miles north-west out to Whale Cay to have a look. With my binoculars I first thought I could see several sailboats passing in either direction through the cut without difficulty, so we decided to try it, but as we got closer we realized the boats were actually just sailing around in the bay, south of the Whale, and we could see huge breaking waves in the passage channel, so we turned the boat around and headed the few miles east to Great Guana Cay instead to wait it out.
Remember how Ana had fallen in love with Spanish Wells and told everybody it was the most beautiful island in the Bahamas? Then we’d visited Man-O-War cay and she had to call everyone back and tell them that it was actually the best island in the Bahamas? Then we visited Hope Town on Elbow Cay and she had to call everyone back and tell them that it was actually the best island in the Bahamas. Well, after visiting Great Guana Cay, she didn’t have to call anybody back.
Great Guana Cay is home to two very famous bars, both destroyed then rebuilt since the hurricane. The one on the south side of the island is called Grabbers and the one on the north is Nippers, building on a theme of rowdy drunkenness. We landed our dinghy at Grabbers, finding a small space amidst all the speedboats, then had a look around. A row of biniki’d hottie teens lay prone on loungers, suntanning. Fifty-something ladies danced with their rum punches. Beer-bellied dads lined up at the huge bar, watching basketball and pounding light beers. Kids ran around with buckets, shovels, and sandy faces. Tourists came and went on rented golf carts. Michael Jackson yipped and squealed like a wounded coyote on the booming speakers. There were no Bahamian customers in sight. We kept walking.
It was a short stroll to the other side of the island, and as we approached Nippers through the tropical pathway, we saw driftwood signs nailed to palm tree trunks, announcing: The Party’s Not Over Until You’re Smiling for A Mug Shot. Beware of Intoxicated Humans. Bad Choices Make Great Stories.
Nippers has a phenomenal location, on a ridge overlooking a gorgeous beach, and it had been rebuilt as a primo resort with multiple decks, two swimming pools, two bars, and a restaurant, all sized to support a lot of customers. Here, the crowd was much the same; in fact I think it was the same, as it was clear the primary activity for island visitors was to zip back and forth between them all day until you either passed out under a coconut tree or your golf cart ran out of gas; at which point you probably staggered off your cart then passed out under a coconut tree.
Both bars (and the island) seemed to be populated primarily by wealthy Americans. How could I tell? Well, first we passed two wobbly couples walking between the bars and they shot us a “How y’all doin?”. Then there was this exchange between a mature couple in the Nippers exorbitantly priced gift shop as she was trying on shirts.
“Awh honey, I love this one,” drawled the wife as she posed in front of her husband in a Nippers shirt emblazoned with a winking pirate. “But I really love the other one too, the one with the piggies on front.”
“Don’t worry dear,” soothed her hubby as he tapped the bulge in his pocket and smiled. “You can have both of them.”
Another clue. Our subsequent walk took us to a grocery store which did not have prices on anything. I picked up a cabbage and asked the check-out clerk how much it was.
“It’s priced by the pound,” she said, looking at me, slightly annoyed. I looked back.
"OK. Uh, how much per pound?” I asked.
She sighed and gave me the Are you serious? stare, then typed a few things into a machine and said, “Two forty-nine a pound,” and was thinking Are you happy now, cheapass? There were no customer weigh scales so I held it up in one hand and balanced it against an imagined three-pound barbell in the other and estimated a cabbage worth about eight bucks. I gently placed the head back on the shoulders of the rack and we left.
We walked to a dive shop and I went inside to inquire on the cost of a two-tank dive. Inside was a woman at a computer and a man standing in the shop. It wasn't clear if both or either were the owners, or if they were maybe a couple, but after some discussion together, the woman told me they didn’t do individual dives anymore, but we could rent the boat, divemaster, and gear for $1500, maximum five divers, not including tax and tip. The obliterated look on my face let her know we wouldn’t be taking on that charter, so we instead struck up an unrelated conversation and asked about the catamaran out in the harbour, being buoyed by giant floats and with two high powered pumps emptying it of seawater. We learned it was indeed the catamaran that had sent the mayday call two days prior after getting impaled on a reef, and it had been towed here by a salvage company, who were doing hull patching and would then be towing it to Freeport for a full restoration.
Our conversation turned to weather and passage making and the man told us he sails here and back every year from Jacksonville, Florida on his catamaran. We told him of our proposed route to the US and he recommended another option - the route he typically takes - which involves leaving from the Whale Cut out into the ocean and sailing outside of the Great Bahama Bank, which requires fewer miles and is faster than taking the inside route to Great Sale Cay then West End. He typically makes it to Jacksonville in 48 hours and after consulting his weather apps, confirmed that our plan to leave Saturday looked like a good weather window to make the trip.
We thanked him profusely for his help and left the dive shop with a new route and the slighty uncomfortable knowledge that we had just two days left in the Bahamas. After returning to SeaLight, I immediately squeezed into my leotard wetsuit, grabbed my dive gear, and took off in search of conch and lobster, in a panic to make the most of the remaining time we had.
I didn’t find anything besides one juvenile conch and one big grouper who was much too far away to try and spear, and that was after covering a kilometer underwater in the Sea of Abaco. Everywhere I went looked very dead and I saw quite a bit of junk on the bottom – tires, the lower unit of an outboard engine, boat pieces, sunken wood. To make things worse, I had set my spear on the side edge of the dinghy so I could easily grab it from the water, but when I climbed back in and took off across surprisingly choppy water, it must have flipped off somewhere and I lost it.
Still, I was immensely happy being out on the water, ripping around in a dinghy in the turquoise waters of the Bahamas on a sunny Wednesday afternoon.
When I returned to the boat Ana was still busy working on yacht club stuff so I grabbed my scraper and brushes and cleaned the underside of the boat, which had become bearded in bountiful green algae strings with crusty barnacles joining as dazzling ornaments, working in partnership to slow SeaLight's sailing speeds. By the end I was disoriented, out of breath, and completely exhausted. There is something very unsettling with this job. Part of is it the breath holding, the physical exertion, and the possibility of a shark or barracuda appearing suddenly, but it’s also being inverted as you swim the underside of the boat, scraping, with ocean bottom above you and the boat below. Each time I come out for breath, it feels like I am going to lose my way and not find the surface, suffocate on ocean water, and slowly sink to the bottom, eyes blanking out, lifeless body visible to anybody looking down from a boat. I do not enjoy that job.
Ana and I had a lovely sundowner in the cockpit, I sounded the conch horn, and with the time shift of the past weekend (could Trump PLEASE do one great thing for humanity and trash Daylight Savings Time??) we didn’t start making dinner until 7:30. Dinner was excellent par usual and after cleaning we had just enough time to watch one episode of a new British crime series before retiring for a restful sleep on a calm and quiet ocean.
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