"The thing is," said Willie Rolle, although with his Bahamian accent it came out da ting is, "it don't matter that you white and I black, because we all people, you know?" The people of Black Point are incredibly welcoming and friendly toward cruisers, and Willie, a local guide and fisherman, was trying to explain why. "That's why we have the free water, the free garbage cans -- then you want to come here, maybe eat at Lorraine's, go to the store, see our town and meet us people. We like to meet you, maybe you like to meet us too."
All the cruisers we'd talked to who had been to Black Point raved about it. We arrived after a short but splendid sail, got an anchor down and headed to the dinghy dock. The town is small (although it's the largest in the Exumas other than the towns on Great Exuma) and many of the cinderblock houses are quite ramshackle, with unfinished buildings abandoned here and there. The road is just a bunch of potholes held together with a little asphalt. The women sit in front of their houses and weave straw into hats and baskets; each gave us a smile and a "Good afternoon" as we passed.
The population, according to the guidebook, is around 300, and from what we saw it seems that at least 200 of them are children. As we walked we collected little black girls, first one, then another, until we were surrounded by a great cloud of children. Some skipped along us, some rode bicycles; one little girl, probably about five years old, slipped her hand into Britt's as we walked, and pretty soon another little girl claimed his other hand. It was quite a parade!
We went down the street to a yard which was decorated with driftwood and conch shells in the poses of statues. A wooden sign read, "The Garden of Eden". One slightly older girl said that her daddy had made it, and we oohed and ahhed appropriately. Later, when we'd headed back into the town center and managed to shake the kids, we walked into a bar/restaurant just to check it out and a local man came over to talk to us. This was Willie Rolle, who turned out to be the architect of the "Garden". For the past thirty years, he said, he has been looking at the shapes in the clouds and then beachcombing to find driftwood with those shapes that he can put in his garden.
In the morning we took our bicycles to shore, the first time we'd gotten them out since we'd left Florida. As we expected, we attracted quite an audience of local kids as we put the bikes together on the pier. When I asked one little boy to hold my bike steady while I inserted the seat post, six little hands shot out to help me, and one girl shyly handed me the seat.
The town of Black Point is near the northern tip of Great Guana Cay, which is a long and skinny island. First we pedaled northeast, where the road stretched away from town toward some hills. The road, marginal to begin with, changed to gravel, and from gravel to sand. We passed the garbage dump and the road deteriorated into two tracks of scrub and sand, but our mountain bikes had no difficulty at all. When the road petered out into an overgrown trail, we set the bikes by the side and continued by foot to where a small saltwater stream, with a few small boats at anchor, crossed the island near its northwest tip. We followed the stream bed the short distance to the Exuma Sound side and watched big waves, driven by the strong easterly wind, pound against the rocky beach.
We retraced our route almost to town and then took a side road we'd seen, which led past some houses and then turned to a doubletrack across hard flat limestone. We rode up a hill and then down into a bit of a basin, where to our surprise was evidence of farming -- a few scrubby cornfields and a bit of a rock wall ruin. The road continued, longer than we expected, and eventually petered out at a trail which connected a beach on the east side with one on the west side. There were a few boats anchored in the cove on the west side, and we saw a few people out walking on the beach, obviously from those boats. It was a lovely ride and we returned to town in great spirits, pleased we'd been able to explore a bit.
After lunch, we went fish hunting along with Jeff from Whish. After diving on a few small heads in a wide and shallow area, we went to a cut north of Black Point, where the waves thundered against the rocks and the current did its best to sweep us out to our deaths -- and where huge schools of large snapper swam around coral heads, and giant lobsters hid in crevices. It was challenging snorkeling, but the sea life was fantastic. We only stayed until a short while after slack tide, as the current built into absolute untenability, so we hit a few spots which were calmer (and correspondingly less rich) before heading back.
Jeff had an extra Hawaiian sling which I borrowed, but I only managed to amuse the fish and didn't do any real damage. I think I was a little too tentative, probably partly due to my worry about losing someone else's spear. (The Hawaiian sling is a projectile weapon,like a slingshot that shoots a spear. The pole spear, which is what Britt uses, is a spear with a rubber sling on the end which is drawn back to provide some thrust when released, but the spear never leaves the hand. These are the only weapons allowed for taking sea life while snorkeling in the Bahamas. Hunting with SCUBA gear is illegal, as are spearguns.)
The men, however, who have had much more practice at this, got a great haul. Several snapper of different types, a couple of queen triggerfish, and four lobster, two of which were absolutely enormous, both 16 inches from head to tail. One big lobster was male and the other was female. The male had a thicker body and its legs were much bigger around, while the female had a bigger tail. I guess some biological characteristics transcend species!
Speaking of biological characteristics, all this spearfishing seems to have awoken a primordial killer instinct. A spear in the hand transforms Britt into Hunter Man. Ugh! Me go kill food for my woman to cook! And it's not just him -- all the men we know have become bloodthirsty fish-killers. Most cruisers headed for the Bahamas buy a pole spear or Hawaiian sling in Florida. The man (rarely the woman) starts out playing with the weapon a bit, thinking of it as a diverting alternative to a hook and line, but after a few successful shots, something changes. He gets the fever. He checks out every anchorage for coral heads and rock ledges, and can't wait to get into the water with his weapon so he can hunt down and kill some dinner. It's not like fishing at all, which is mostly just a matter of tossing out a line and hoping something comes by, it's the personal mano a mano challenge of stalking a wily snapper or a trophy lobster.
A few days before, we'd had a "fish tasting" of the previous haul. After the fish had been filleted, I baggied the different fish into different bags. When I cooked them up I carefully arranged them in the pan according to species, so that we could compare the different types. The triggerfish, which we had heard great things about, turned out to be quite tasty indeed, but the best of the lot was one of our mystery fish. Later we borrowed somebody's fish book and discovered that it was a yellowfin mojarra; we've never heard of it before, but we sure hope we can find some again.
On Sunday I decided to go to church. Now, I'm not normally a churchgoing person -- heck, I'm Jewish -- but the Bahamians tend to be religious, and Charles and Sharon on Providenza, who are spending most of the winter in Black Point for the second year in a row, had announced on VHF that the locals enjoyed having the cruisers attend services, and it sounded like an interesting way of interacting with the community, so I put on a modest dress and a straw hat and joined Charles and Sharon at the mission church (one of three churches). We were the only white faces, of course, but Sharon and Charles are well known and respected in the community, and as I was in a way their guest, I also felt welcome.
When Providenza first visited Black Point three years ago, they attended church and noticed that although there was a piano in the corner, nobody played it during the service. The pastor said, sadly, that nobody in town knew how to play. Well, it just so happens that Sharon is a retired piano teacher. She offered to teach someone how to play -- and over thirty people showed up to learn! The following year they came to Black Point for several months, and Sharon gave music classes to both children and adults, while Charles, who is retired from Ford, helped locals fix their outboard engines and other mechanical things. This year they brought 15 keyboards with them, and Sharon plans to distribute them to promising students when they leave.
The service began with singing. There were perhaps 40 people in the building, and they sang hymns enthusiastically as Sharon accompanied on piano. Then the pastor stepped up to the podium, a young and handsome man with a resonant voice and engaging manner. First he gently chided his brother, whose wife and children were sitting in a different pew, and when his brother got up to join the rest of his family, the whole congregation laughed and applauded. He acknowledged me as a visitor and invited me to stand and introduce myself. Then he launched into his sermon. He was a commanding speaker, alternately exhorting and beseeching the congregation, drawing on both biblical verses and recent news. Every time he drew a breath, "Praise Jesus! Amen!" came from the crowd.
At the end of the service we all stood for a brief prayer, and then everyone began greeting each other and shaking hands. Many of the people there specifically came over to me, to introduce themselves and shake my hand, and this more than anything else made me feel happy that I had come. The congregation was nearly all women and children. One woman told me that when couples from different churches married, each continued to attend his or her own church, so I assumed that the other major church there was the "men's church", but when I talked to another cruiser who had attended services there, she told me that it had been all women and children there as well. Later, Sharon said that most Black Point men stopped attending church after about age 18. They went out fishing, or just laid low so as not to offend their wives.
I called Britt on the portable VHF (just like a local man, he'd not accompanied me to services!) and he met me at Lorraine's Cafe for lunch. Since we had enjoyed our stay in Black Point, we felt we ought to spend a little money there, so we had lunch and bought a loaf of whole-wheat bread which had just a hint of coconut flavor to it (yum). After a leisurely lunch, we went back to the dinghy dock, but it took us almost an hour to get back to the boat since we stopped by several other boats to chat with friends.
We had been pleased to hear our friends Sarah and Kevin on Severn Star on the VHF while we were in Black Point. They were in Little Farmer's Cay, about 12 miles south, and headed north; we hadn't seen them since Thanksgiving in Charleston. We met up in a little cove on the west side of Great Guana Cay where we spent a couple of days together.
Kevin had also been bitten by the spearfishing bug, and had discovered a small coral head populated by crabs. We all went snorkeling, and he and Britt speared two spider crabs and a coral crab while Sarah and I floated around and watched the fish. That evening we shared the crab in our cockpit, then grilled up a hogfish they'd caught the day before, along with the last of our Black Point fish fillets.
The following day all four of us got into our dinghy and explored the island. We weren't very far from The Crossing, the narrowest spot in the island -- we actually found it by noticing the spray kicked up by the waves on the other side. We walked the hundred yards or so across to the Exuma Sound side, where even though it was a fairly calm day the waves pounded against the limestone shore. Lots of flotsam had washed up and we played with old fishing floats and hanks of plastic line. Then we dinghied further south, where we had a picnic on the beach and then bushwacked through dwarf palms and rosemary-like bushes, eventually coming out on the Sound side again. After we fought our way back to our beach, we walked its length and then dinghied close in to the shore. Between the stretches of beach, the limestone bank was undercut, and we poked our heads into several small caves on the way back to the boats.
Severn Star is heading north, to cruise the Exumas before returning to George Town. We're more or less on our way to George Town, so we hope to hook up again there and perhaps travel together to some of the Out Islands.
Kevin and Sarah seemed awfully well-informed about events back in the U.S. "Oh, we listen to NPR every morning on the American Forces Network -- didn't you know about it?" Well, we hadn't, but now we do; unfortunately Morning Edition conflicts with some of our weather radio timetable, but we've got 6458.5 USB programmed into our SSB now, and when we don't feel we need the morning weather information we listen to Bob Edwards and Carl Castle. As NPR addicts, it's great to get our fix even out here!