currently at:  Northwest Point, Mayaguana
current date: 16 March 2005

This is my least favorite part of cruising. No, it's not a tricky reef entry, nor a breakdown of some critical bit of equipment. It's saying goodbye.

When it comes down to it, cruising is all about the people you meet. It's probably not a coincidence that our best times and most enjoyable memories center around places where we were with people who had become good friends. When we were traveling solo in the fleet - not when we were by ourselves alone, but among other boats we didn't know or didn't feel a connection with - we always felt a little dissatisfied, a little unhappy. It was better to be completely on our own, but even then we always looked forward to meeting other people and sharing the experience.

Traveling with Ithaka over the past month has been absolutely wonderful. Douglas and Bernadette are like us in so many ways, from our outlook on cruising to our outlook on politics, and yet their backgrounds and experiences are so different from ours that we can always learn something new from them, and they from us. We'll greatly miss the wide-ranging conversation that took place almost every evening in one or the other cockpit. We'll miss Bernadette's delicious cooking, and Douglas's gusto with a pole spear, and most of all their willingness to explore with us all these rarely-visited anchorages that we've been enjoying together.

Ithaka and Windom finally left Samana together a few days ago, transiting the complex reef break at mid-day when the visibility was good and moving a few miles to what's called the "Columbus Anchorage," which is a sandy shelf just west of the anchorage we'd been in. It's not particularly protected, but the winds were light, and the point was to be somewhere we could leave safely to begin our passage in the middle of the night. After some excellent snorkeling along the deep reef separating the sandy shelf from the other anchorage area, we had an early dinner and set the alarm; at 2:30 am we were lifting anchor and underway for Mayaguana.

The wind had shifted to westerlies so it was a downwind sail; in the morning as we approached Mayaguana we could see the wind-driven waves battering the island's west coast. We pulled in to Abraham's Bay and spent a few days there, recovering from the abbreviated night and snorkeling the reefs. As the wind shifted to the southeast and then fell off to nearly nothing, the seas diminished, and on Monday we motored back out and up the west coast to Northwest Point, a remote and rarely-visited lee anchorage. The water here's the clearest we've seen, turning the sand Bahamian turquoise, and even though we're anchored in 30 feet we can identify the fish that hover near the tufts of soft coral at the bottom.

The snorkeling here has been lovely. We found one area of tall coral heads and ridges bordering a sand channel, filled with grouper and snapper and jacks and lobster. (A couple fewer of them, now that we've been there!) The formations on top of one of the heads resembled a bit of chain...nearby there was an odd sort of circular formation...after poking around, Britt realized we'd discovered an ancient shipwreck. The various relics were so encrusted by coral they were difficult to identify, but it was clear that they were parts of a ship. Britt retrieved one encrusted granite ballast stone - we collect so many rocks from the tops of mountains we climb, it seemed appropriate to grab one from the bottom of a trench!

Douglas, Britt and I have been gleefully hunting the raw materials for seafood dinners. Last night we hosted a big gala farewell, as it were: lobster rumaki appetizers followed by stir-fried lobster with ginger and carrots and orange juice, atop the marvelous basmati brown rice that Douglas makes. Along with us and Ithaka, Simba is here; Frank and Lynda are friends of Douglas and Bernadette's, and they made a beeline here to meet up with them, as they're all traveling to the Turks and Caicos, and then Jamaica, and then Panama.

Not us. We're turning back west and north again, staying in the Bahamas; we have friends coming for a visit in less than two weeks. We'll head for George Town, where we can refill our propane tanks, buy fresh veggies, and do laundry, then cruise the south-central Exumas with our Colorado friends.

But we won't forget our new cruising friends. It's so great to meet people we really click with, and we don't give them up easily. When we left Windom in Florida to head back to Colorado, our road trip took us from one cruising friend to another, from Maine to Ontario to Michigan; one couple visited us in Colorado last summer, and several others (you know who you are!) have open invitations. So even though it's depressing to say "so long" - we know it's only until we meet again.