Part 2: The Scourge of Flying Teeth
After a restless night resulting as much from discomfort as anticipation, we woke at 6:15 a.m. Two hours to go til the Cruiser's Net on VHF Channel 68. I'm looking forward to the familiar voices of Patty and Barmeter Bob. When I walked into the head, the air was cloudy with mosquitos, their symphonic whine bouncing off the fiberglass walls. I found a can of Raid and sprayed them into oblivion, doing the same to the similar cloud of skeeters in the bunk we're using for storage. I went down the dock to use the shoreside facilities, wanting to be sure the little buggers in the head were good and dead. We had not closed the companionway, and neglected to put the screen in one of the hatches, and this was the price we paid. While we didn't have a coffeemaker this morning (Mike got us one later), Rick did get us cinnamon rolls at the bakery yesterday, so breakfast in the cockpit was quite tasty.
The Cruiser's Net weather report called for mostly cloudy skies; scattered showers and thunderstorms (someone had spotted a waterspout off Elbow Cay earlier); a high of 86; and winds starting at SE, then E, then NE, all at 10-15 knots. After a quick briefing from Mike, we were off at 9:30 a.m., under a milky sky. Once out of Marsh Harbour proper, we raise the sails and shut down the engines. This moment of silence is, to me, the essence of what makes sailing so special. The only sounds we have are the breeze in the sails, gently swishing water under our hulls, and occasional radio chatter. The Sea of Abaco has wind ripples, but is generally flat, as we head for Baker's Bay on Great Guana Cay.
Since the sky is a bit cloudy, we don't have the full effect of the colors of the Sea of Abaco. Under full sunlight, it's a miraculous sight, all of those different blues and greens. In the shallower, sandy stretches, you can count the starfish on the bottom. If a paint company were to match those colors, they could do paint strips with different colors for different depths The color I painted my bathroom at home is "Sea of Abaco at 18 Feet."
By noon, the Baker's Bay anchorage is in sight, with its blazing white stretch of beach. With easterly winds predicted, this is a good place to anchor tonight. To my disappointment, there are lots of boats here today -- perhaps 30 -- but given the size of the anchorage and our shallow draft we're able to tuck in close to shore, away from the "crowds." To anchor, Rick and I employed our well-tested (and often-teased-about) system of hand signals, with me at the helm and Rick at the bow. Though my performance with two engines (which cut in and out most annoyingly at low RPMs) on this new-to-me boat was less than a perfect "10", we stuck the anchor on the first try. While Rick dove the anchor, I made lunch of chicken salad on yummy Bahamian bread.
Every journey to Abaco is for us a combination of visiting well-known and well-loved sites, as well as discovering new ones. So, while we've come to know and love Baker's Bay and the nearby northwest and Atlantic ocean beaches, we had yet to visit the Spoil Bank Cay (or Shell Island) just northwest. So that was our adventure today, and we were well-armed with our Teva sandals for what can be a foot-slashing beach circumnavigation. The Spoil Bank Cay was created from the dredged leavings (the "spoil") of a cruise ship company which dug out a cruise ship channel and turning basin at the northern end of Great Guana Cay. Nature has since made the site her own, and it now teems with vegetation, birds and lizards, and its beaches are covered with millions of shells, most smaller than an inch but many larger. Since my house is already filled with bowls of shells and sand dollars, we now normally pick up only extraordinary specimens or flotsam for a special project (like the beach glass I found in Grand Turk which was used to make a mosaic picture frame). So here we are, standing on this amazing beach with zillions of perfect shells for the taking, looking for an excuse to pick some up, when -- voila! -- Rick realizes that his OFFICE doesn't have any shells. Now we're off to the races, and pick up a few dozen perfect specimens.
As we walked around the Spoil Bank Cay, we passed a few fellow travelers and shared common sentiments: "This is really awful." "Yeah, it pretty much sucks here." "Someone has to make the sacrifice to suffer being here." I guess we're all so blissed out that positive words don't do the trick and we resort to irony. Along the way, we meet a Coloradan on a catamaran with whom we struck up a conversation about marinas in Annapolis, as his family's cruise from the Bahamas up the East Coast will lead him to our stomping grounds. He would be in need of transient dockage, so naturally we referred him to our home marina. However, lightning and ominous clouds on the western horizon cut our conversation short, and we picked up the pace so we could return to Trinket and make sure everything was tied down.
But as we dinked past Trinket, the weather seemed to settle and all hatches were battened, so we landed the dink on the beach at Baker's Bay. We had plans to go walking to the former cruise ship facilities (which look like a cross between Gilligan's Island and Fantasy Island) or to look for the trail which cuts across to the ocean side beach. But neither of those was to happen because the beach was filled with voracious sand fleas ("flying teeth") and bloodthirsty mosquitos. In our haste to escape the marauding hordes, we dove into the blood-warm water of the bay, even though a few persistent mosquitos followed us off the beach. After dispatching with the straggling mosquitos most in-humanely (smacking them dead), we floated in the clear water until our fingers were pruny. We then bravely made a stealth attack on the beach to reclaim our dinghy. After the beach attack, we returned to the boat, boarded our Fun-noodles, and floated between the hulls of our boat, under the trampoline (and out of the sun), holding on to a rope so that the current didn't carry our lazy butts away.
It never did rain Sunday afternoon, even though it looked like it was going to. We whiled away the rest of the afternoon reading, writing, lounging in the cockpit or on the trampoline, and drinking Kalik. For our first dinner afloat, I made an all-Bahamian meal: conch chowder, Bahamian bread, and Kalik (I am an enthusiastic soup-maker, and reverse-engineer the ones I really like in restaurants, so my conch chowder is almost as good as an authentic one.)
The rest of the evening passed just as un-strenuously, and by 9:30 p.m., we were passed out in our bunk, coated with Skintastic. But as soon as we drifted off, the wind cranked up and lightning started to flash. Rick checked the anchor and I slammed the hatches closed as the rain started to pour. The rain and wind passed quickly, but not wanting to go through a second Hatch Drill, we left the hatches closed for the night.
