Five: The Cruising Community
…Yet I cannot tarry longer
The sea that calls all things unto her
Calls me,
And I must embark
For to stay, though the hours burn in the night,
Is to freeze and crystallize and be bound in a mold
—Kahil Gibran, The Prophet
Despite my troubles with the wind that day and the doubts it created about my ability to complete the trip, I reached Wardrick Wells Cay, where construction was underway to build a new headquarters for the land and sea park. Peggy, the park warden, was in the meantime working out of the large trawler yacht she lived on at anchor off Wardrick Wells. She offered me a cold beer when I paddled up to inquire about camping. She understood what it was to travel as I was doing and told me I could camp on the adjacent beach, regardless of park rules. There were several large tents already there, and Peggy explained that the workers building the headquarters were young people from Operation Raleigh, who were living in camp during their work assignment there.
I paddled over and introduced myself to the members of the team, and learned that Operation Raleigh is a volunteer group from the United Kingdom, similar to the U.S. Peace Corps. They were just knocking off for the day, and Hendrick, a young man from the outskirts of London, was on cook duty and invited me to join them for dinner. There was a total of 7 in the group, 4 women and 3 men. All were from England, except for the woman named Tessa, who said she was from Melbourne, Australia. Most of them rotated to various projects around the world; Tessa told me she had recently been working in Chile.
While I was waiting for dinner, a Canadian man and his daughter, who were cruising alone on their small sailboat, Heron I, came over to look at my kayak. Lawrence Pitcairn told me that he had paddled with the Canadian National Canoe Team in years past. He was intrigued by my kayak and my brief account of the journey. He and his daughter, Laura, had found some conch while skin diving, and he told me that he was about to clean them on the beach. Eager to learn how to prepare this readily available food source in case I needed it in the future, I followed Lawrence and Laura to where he had left the conch and watched the procedure attentively. The indigenous natives of these islands made good use of this giant marine snail, as evidenced by the walls of conch shells they left behind. Some of these walls were several feet high and hundreds of yards long, each shell in them exhibiting the telltale human-made hole necessary to extract the meat.
Lawrence showed me where to make the hole, using a hammer. This makes it possible to slip a knife inside and cut loose the attached muscle. Then you pull the slimy creature out by its foot and cut off the eyestalks and other inedible parts, including the tough skin. It’s an unappetizing sight to say the least, but when it’s finished, you have a considerable chunk of rubbery, white meat – pure protein. Lawrence insisted that it was perfectly good raw, and handed me a thin slice after eating one himself. It wasn’t bad, but like Ben’s whelks, I decided that I wouldn’t do any damage to the conch population unless I found myself in dire straits. Seventeen-year-old Laura wasn’t enthusiastic about conch either, and kept herself at a safe distance throughout the procedure.
Back at camp, Hendrick showed me the supply tent for Operation Raleigh, where they had boxes of freeze-dried British military rations. They were sick of this fare after living on it for so long. Today’s menu called for several packets labeled “Spaghetti Bolognese”, and after Hendrick added the necessary hot water, we all sat down to eat, following the meal with freeze-dried banana custard. The food was good as far as I was concerned, so the following morning before I left, Hendrick loaded me down with a two-week supply of the rations, which he said was surplus that they would never eat. I gladly accepted this windfall of free grub. I would eat compliments of the British taxpayers for a while! After stuffing all these food packets into my kayak, I left Wardrick Wells, stopping by to say good-bye to Peggy on the way out. She had a ham radio on her boat, and said she would call ahead to other ham operators on boats to tell them I was coming through.
South of the park, where I camped on a small, uninhabited cay, I received more unexpected hospitality. A young man from Florida was angling for bonefish in a small skiff with a Bahamian guide, and upon spotting my camp; they came over to give me three cold sodas. I was content to be in the Bahamas as I cooked dinner that night. Never had I been in a place where all the people went out of their way to be friendly. Even the animals were friendly, except for the sharks. As I ate, several fat curly-tail lizards crawled about my feet with no sign of fear, waiting for their share. I gave them bits of cheese, which they nibbled at while they watched with apparent curiosity as I set up my tent on their island.
My next civilized stopover was at Sampson’s Cay the following day, where I found outrageous prices in the only food store. I paddled on to Staniel Cay, only five miles farther south. As I approached the crowded anchorage at Staniel, a dinghy intercepted me and a couple in it told me they had heard from Peggy by radio that I was coming. They knew I was from Mississippi and had come to tell me that there was a couple on a sailboat called the Miss Reb who were also from Mississippi. I was excited to meet some folks from back home, as I had not seen any since my trip began. The dinghy was gone when I paddled over to Miss Reb, so I set up camp on a nearby island and caught up on my neglected journal while I awaited their return.
In the morning I was invited aboard Miss Reb for coffee, and learned that the couple from Jackson had built the boat themselves and had been living aboard for five years. They had been as far as the Virgin Islands, and planned to eventually sail around the world. They provided much useful information about the route ahead and gave me an empty Clorox jug, saying that they had found the one-gallon containers to be much more reliable for carrying water than the leaky “Reliance” container I was using.
Later that morning, when I pulled my kayak up on the beach at Staniel Cay, a Bahamian on a moped stopped and began questioning me about my trip. His questions turned to preaching when he found out I was traveling alone, had no family of my own, and was not in church on Sundays. His advice also covered the physical dangers after he learned of my run-ins with sharks. In his opinion, the large barracudas that were always hanging around the reefs were equally aggressive.
“Dat Barry, he cut you up, mon. I git out de wahtah when Barry, he come ‘round.”
After the part-time preacher putted away on the little moped, I walked up to the store he’d directed me to and purchased some canned goods, chocolate bars, rice, and bread and butter. I returned to the shaded beach near my kayak, where I sat down to eat. The bread was the same as that I had enjoyed so much on Eleuthera. What made it even better was the excellent canned butter imported from New Zealand. I was told by several yachties that this product would keep a long time without refrigeration.
Dinghies from the many yachts in the harbor came and went, landing on the beach beside my kayak. I watched as a man with two female companions approached in a wooden rowing dinghy. Most of the cruisers were much older than I was, but this trio had to be in their early twenties. They landed and the man went straight to my kayak, walking around it with obvious awe and appreciation.
“Somebody’s traveling in this thing,” he said to the women, “look at that compass on the deck!”
I emerged from the shadows where I had been eating unnoticed and introduced myself. Mark, from Norfolk, Virginia, and his Danish girlfriend Lis, had sailed there from the Chesapeake. The other woman was a friend of Lis’s who had flown out from Copenhagen to Nassau to join them for a few days. Mark invited me out to their vintage wooden sailboat, Elske, for dinner, and there I met the other crewmember, Chelsie, a big Chesapeake Bay retriever who leapt over the side and swam out to greet us as we approached the yacht. Lis and her friend cooked dinner, and afterwards Mark invited me to stay aboard for the night, since there were likely no isolated beaches on Staniel Cay where I could camp. Grateful for the company and the chance to hang out
with some people close to my own age, I spread my sleeping bag in the cockpit beside Chelsie. I regretted not being in my tent when rain in the middle of the night forced me to retreat to the crowded cabin, where I found just enough room to crash on the narrow sole.
The next morning over coffee, Mark told me we were anchored near Thunderball Cave, the famous attraction of Staniel Cay. The cave is in a tiny cay not far from Staniel, and was the location for an underwater James Bond thriller film called Thunderball. The entire rocky islet, which rises abruptly out of the water to a height of about 30 feet, is hollow, with an opening in the roof that illuminates the pool of water inside its base. The cavern below the surface of this pool is teeming with fish. Rock walls around the perimeter of the cay extend down to the pool on all sides, but open up just below the surface. The only way to enter the cavern is to swim underwater from the outside, beneath the walls until you reach the spacious inner chamber. Mark was not an experienced snorkeler, and could not be persuaded to swim into the cave, so Lis and I left him in the dinghy and went in to check it out. It was fantastic. We surfaced inside an eerie grotto with a ceiling more than 20 feet above, from which hung stalactites dripping with water that plopped to the pool with an amplified echo. The light coming through the ceiling was just enough to illuminate the transparent water in the cavern, and we could see schools of big yellowtail and red snapper, the best food fish on the reef. They swam past with no fear, as if aware of the law protecting them from spearfishing in their exotic haven.
The sight of the fish whetted my appetite, so after leaving Thunderball Cave, we motored in the dinghy out to a reef on the edge of the open sea and Mark and I tried unsuccessfully to spear the elusive yellowtails and groupers we found there. The fish near this popular anchorage area were skittish from being over-hunted, and would disappear into rock crevices at the first sight of an approaching swimmer.
I went ashore on Staniel Cay again later that day and saw Laura and Lawrence from Heron I and spent some time talking with them about my kayak. Mark and his crew were leaving that afternoon for Georgetown, so I paddled south myself, planning to make a few miles before dark. I got no farther than the next cay south of Staniel though, because I was so attracted by the beautiful beach on Bitter Guana Cay that I had to pull in and set up my tent even though the sun was still high. This pristine beach was bounded on all sides by high, cactus covered hills, and on the south end, rocky cliffs rose abruptly to 50 feet and hung out over the clear, aquamarine waters. The desolate cay seemed like an alien world with its pockmarked limestone and huge craters. It was like the kind of island I would have expected to find along the Baja coast rather than here in the Bahamas. The moon was full that night, and I hiked about the island for hours, sometimes stopping on a rocky crag overlooking the windward side to watch and listen to the breakers that slammed the foot of the cliffs. I stayed up late when I returned to camp, sitting by a beach fire and attempting to blow some blues on my harmonica.
Perfect beach for camping in the Exumas
I stopped in the town on Little Farmer’s Cay the next day, since Ben had told me it was their favorite hangout in the Exumas. As I pulled my kayak up on the beach, three men who had been watching through the windows of a waterfront bar came down to greet me. One of them was Terry Bain, the mayor.
“Welcome to our island. Our home is your home, my friend,” he said as he shook my hand and took in my answers to his questions about how I had come to land there in a kayak. He told me that Whisper had already been there but had sailed for Georgetown a couple of days before. I was overwhelmed by this exceptionally warm hospitality at Little Farmer’s Cay, but for some inexplicable reason, I didn’t want to stay there. Perhaps I just wanted another night of solitude like I’d had on Bitter Guana Cay. After buying a loaf of bread and filling my water jugs, I said good-bye to Mr. Bain and paddled on until I found a quiet beach a short distance to the south.
The next day I found an even better campsite on Darby Island. There were a few coconut palms on the beach there – something I’d been missing for days. I was disappointed to find that not all the islands in the Bahamas have dense groves of palms like those the Olsens and I found in the Berry Islands. In fact, most of the uninhabited cays I’d seen had no trees or palms of any kind – only desert-like scrub brush and cactus. The few coconut palms I did see were usually on private islands and were planted by the owners. To me the coconut palm was the icon of the tropics and I always felt like the trip I was doing was worthwhile when I saw one.
I set up my tent near these palms on Darby Island and after climbing one to get a couple of green drinking nuts, gathered up my spearfishing gear and headed for the water to hunt the main course. There was a submerged rock wall near the beach, and I swam along this taking futile shots at yellowtails and red snapper that were always quicker than my spear. In deep water beyond the wall, I encountered a granddaddy barracuda that was about six feet long, and remembered the words of the preacher from Staniel Cay: “Dat Barry, he cut you up, mon.” I turned around and swam to shallower water. I couldn’t believe my luck when I saw a huge lobster crawling backwards across the sandy bottom, far from the safety of the rock crevices. I approached to within easy range and speared it through the carapace. I was excited as I rushed back to camp with my first lobster writhing grotesquely on the end of the steel spear. Lobsters are tenacious of life, and even after I did as Ben had taught me and stuck the point of my dive knife into its head and twisted it back and forth, the six legs and two long antennae flailed about with snapping noises, giving the giant crustacean a mechanical appearance. I twisted off the fat tail, where all the delicious white meat is found, and even after I dropped it into a pot of boiling water, it continued to contract involuntarily. The difficulty of killing this creature and its stubborn struggle to live made me wonder if it was worth the trouble and if I could stomach spearing another one.
Fifteen minutes later, however, when the tail had turned to bright red and the meat within was snow white, I decided that it was worth it. I spiced it up with Tony Chacere’s Cajun seasoning and some Louisiana hot sauce, and washed it down with water from a green coconut. This was living off the land and sea at its finest.
The following day was dreary and overcast, unusual for the Bahamas. During the past two weeks, the sun had been my biggest enemy, even more incessant than the wind. It blazed in the cloudless blue skies and burned my already browned skin. Often I could find no relief from it in the barren Exumas, and when I stopped for lunch I would crouch in the shade of a rock and try to eat bread with the melted canned butter. I was relieved today to have a brief respite from the burning rays, but the skies seemed to grow stormier as the afternoon advanced and the strong southeast wind reduced my progress to a pitiful one mile per hour. I had set for my goal that day the small settlement of Barraterre, just north of Great Exuma Island, but it was still miles away when night was approaching, and the islands nearby offered no possibilities for landing or camping on their rugged shores. I could see the low profile of a sandy cay about four miles to the east, so I headed for it, splashing through choppy seas and fighting wind that threatened to tear the paddle from of my hands.
Dark clouds swept over the open expanse of water south of me and I watched with fascination as a towering waterspout danced slowly across the horizon. I kept my bow stubbornly pointed at the little island, anxious to complete the crossing before the weather got worse. I also did not want to paddle these waters after nightfall, when sharks are more active. When I reached the other side, it was fully dark, and what had looked from a distance like a beach was actually smooth rock. I couldn’t land there through the surge without damaging my boat, so I followed the shoreline to the south, where I came upon a sailboat anchored in a protected cove. The couple on board filled my water jugs and told me they had been watching my crossing through binoculars. They couldn’t believe I was out paddling in such rough conditions, and informed me that another waterspout had passed close behind me as I paddled. I was
glad I had not looked over my shoulder, as I might have panicked at the sight of a sea-going tornado so close at hand.
I paddled another half-mile past the sailboat, finding an ideal sandy beach for camping. The bad weather didn’t last, and soon the moon illuminated the white sand so that it almost seemed like daytime. I could see the few lights of Barraterre to the west as I cooked some of the freeze-dried rations from Operation Raleigh. I decided that since it was Saturday night, I would take a full day off. I needed the rest, and I figured I probably wouldn’t be able to buy the supplies I needed from Barraterre on a Sunday anyway. I spent my time on the tranquil beach re-charging my Ni-Cad batteries with the solar panel, writing in my journal, and planning my budget for the remainder of the trip. My cash was getting dismally low. I hadn’t counted on these strong winds that would slow my daily progress so much, nor had I allowed for the high food prices in the Bahamas. Most of the basics were double or triple the prices I was used to the States. I wondered if I could stretch what I had far enough to get me the remaining several hundred miles or so to Puerto Rico, the first island where I could legally work.
On Island Time: Kayaking the Caribbean Page 12