Great Exuma is the first island we've been on in quite some time large enough and populated enough to have an actual road on it. (One actual road, more or less.) Our friends Donna and Jeff on Whish, and Trish and Terry on Flirt, who all had bikes aboard, were easily talked into going for a ride to the tropics.
You see, even though we've been in the islands for over a month, wearing shorts and t-shirts in February, most of the Bahamas are not technically in the tropics. The Tropic of Cancer, at 23° 27' N, marks the northern boundary of the official tropics. Great Exuma Island and Little Exuma Island are separated by only a short distance, which is spanned by a bridge, and the Tropic of Cancer goes right smack across the middle of that bridge.
We pedaled out of George Town, keeping carefully to the left as the Bahamians drive on the "wrong side", and soon we were out in the wild. An occasional house punctuated the scrubby vegetation, but for the most part it was a lonely road, paved but narrow. Sailing, it always seems that the wind's on the nose; bicycling was no different, and we consoled ourselves with the thought that at least we'd have a tailwind on the return. A few hills made us breathe even harder, and the sun beating down upon us was every bit as tropical as that awaiting us eight miles away in Little Exuma.
The bridge between the islands was even narrower than the rest of the road, pretty much a one-laner, and although there was a center section which looked like it might be liftable, the guardrail was solid, so we could tell it wasn't used regularly as a drawbridge. We cheered our passage into the tropics, then rode into The Ferry, a town named after the ferry which used to be the only way to pass between the islands before the bridge was built. Here we met Sheryl from Colleen, who had no bike but had hitchhiked out to meet us. After a picnic lunch atop a hill with a scenic view of the water, we knocked on the door of The Ferry's most famous resident, Gloria Patience, a.k.a the Shark Lady.
Mrs. Patience must be something over 70 years old, feisty and a bit eccentric. She's a rarity in that she's a white native Exuman (there are apparently a lot of white Bahamians in the Abacos, but nearly all the population of the Exumas is black). She has done a lot of fishing in her 70 years, and caught over a thousand sharks. Supposedly she used to make jewelry out of the teeth, to sell to tourists, but her "museum" shop had no shark teeth in it other than a rather impressive fossilized Great White Shark tooth.
She invited us into her house, which is billed as a museum but is actually just an amazingly huge junk collection. Glass and china dishes lined every shelf, statuettes and knicknacks and souvenirs filled all the tables, and every bit of wall or other vertical surface was covered with a poster, a newspaper clipping, or a calendar displaying a random month from a random year. The table in the center of the room had a huge sort of sculpture made from driftwood, with necklaces of plastic beads hanging from each tip. The overall effect was impressively tacky, as if someone had taken the contents of a few dozen grandma's attics, a couple of gifte shoppes, and a yard sale or two, and arrayed them all in one house.
After our visit with the Shark Lady, Sheryl hitched back to town, and the rest of us continued southeast. We passed through the community of Forbes Hill, by old stone walls which were probably part of a fort built by the British in 1892. One abandoned building, which we later discovered was once a school, sat at the top of a flight of beautiful old steps carved out of the solid limestone hill.
We finally entered the outskirts of Williams Town, a small settlement at the far end of Little Exuma which was as far as we could go by road. In one yard a man was building a traditional Bahamian sailing sloop, and we waved and watched for a moment before continuing on to the town center. There wasn't much there -- we saw one store -- but we hoped we could get an ice cream or a cold drink, so we stopped and hailed a man lounging in the shade of a bus shelter. He asked where we'd ridden from ("All the way from George Town? Man! That a long way!") but just shook his head when we asked where we could buy ice cream.
"What about a drink?"
"Well, down da road you can get a beer at da building around da curve."
We laughed and told him we'd probably pass out with one sip. "All we're looking for is something cold, like a soda."
He brightened. "Oh, I know where you can get a soda. Follow me."
He led us across the street and around the back of a house to an enclosed porch, where after an earnest consultation with the grandmotherly woman inside he popped his head out and motioned for us to come in. I think she was his mother-in-law, or some similar relation, and she sold us cans of Coke from her fridge. We stood around and drank and talked with her; she had lived all her life in Williams Town, and used to have to walk five miles each way to Forbes Hill for school, in the building at the top of the limestone steps. She'd raised seven children, each of whom was successful in some way. One was a doctor, one a nurse, one a teacher, and they all lived in Nassau except her youngest son. "He live here in Williams Town," she said, "and he building a boat. My husband, he eighty-one years old, and he supervising. He build lots of boats all his life." His last boat was wrecked in a storm, but they were building another one to enter in the Family Islands Regatta which would be held in late April.
Was that him we saw up the road, we asked? She nodded and smiled widely, and when we asked if she thought it would be okay if we stopped by and watched him and asked him questions about his boat, her grin got even bigger. "Oh, yes, he love that." We asked for his name, then thanked her for the drinks and headed back down the road.
At the boatbuilding site we dropped our bikes and approached the old man sanding planks by the boat. "Mr. Shervin Gray?"
He put down the sander and turned to us slowly. "Well," he drawled, "I see you know my name. I guess I'm famous."
"We just talked to your wife, in town. She said you were building a boat out here for the regatta."
He shook his head. "Oh no, I ain't building her. Just supervising. My son, he work for Batelco during the day, he come and build it at night, but he ask me to put in the shutter board, so here I am."
We gathered around the hull as he explained how the traditional Bahamian sloop was built. Fir planks were nailed to the mahogany frame from the rail down and from the keel up, meeting in the middle at the "shutter board" which had to match the curve of both top and bottom. The pieces which made up the frame were cut from solid mahogany boards, using a template he formed from a piece of flexible copper pipe. "It's a reverse curve, you see?" He traced his hand around the hull showing us how it was convex around the turn of the bilge, then concave as it approached the keel.
"How do you know how to make the curve?"
"I know. I built a lot of boats. And I read books that say, for a boat this long and this wide, how big the mast be, how big the boom be. So I know how to build a good boat. Nobody listen to me, nobody think I know what I doing, but I know. She gonna be 23 foot long, and this boat should have a mast no more than 45 foot. These people, they put a mast 50, 55 foot on a boat like this. Then you got to put too much ballast in. I say, a boat sails on the water, not in the water. It ain't no submarine!"
The boat would be named Flying Eagle, his son's choice. "Me, I wanted her to be the Great Exena. Like Xena, you know? 'Cause she mad all the time. I'd put a woman's face here" -- he pointed at the bow -- "with a big frown on it, and one at the back with a smile." We laughed and said he should save the name for his next boat, but he shook his head. "She the last boat I build, and I ain't even building her. Just helping my boy learn how to make a boat."
A younger man, clearly a bit drunk, was hanging out around the boat. He was claiming to be a sailor -- "I work da jib", he kept saying -- but the old man shook his head in disgust. "He only good with a bottle." This didn't surprise us a bit, as we've seen a lot of Bahamian men hanging around, drinking, while their women worked, clerking in stores or plaiting straw into hats and baskets for the tourist market. Shervin Gray was the exception, it seemed, at eighty-one still full of piss and vinegar and passion about his craft. We think it's wonderful that he's passing on the skills and techniques of traditional boatbuilding; if his son also absorbs his attitude, it will be the most priceless gift of all.