We're still doing the George Town cruiser thing. Even though the place isn't buzzing like it did during regatta week, there are still plenty of boats here and plenty to do. A few days ago, I took a hike with Sheryl on the network of trails which crisscross Stocking Island, while Britt went fish hunting with a bunch of other guys. (He reports that the reef was largely fished out and had a lot of damage, and the only fish around were fairly small. He stabbed them anyway. Fresh meat, yay!) Yesterday afternoon we had a day of board games on the beach with friends from about half a dozen different boats. I got sucked into a hotly-contested six-way game of Chinese Checkers (which most of us had only played back in the dim days of youth, if at all), then played Boggle, one of my very favorite games. (Boggle turns out to be quite challenging, and somewhat frustrating, with a large number of players.)
In between, we've been making inroads on our book supply, and there are always chores to do on the boat. We also made good use of the first laundromat we'd seen since Nassau, and we finally got through the month's worth of mail we had sent here. We also finally got another digital camera to replace our broken one, but until we get somewhere with cheaper bandwidth, we won't be including too many photos.
Bruce Van Sant, author of Passages South, gave a talk about weather planning for the cruiser headed southbound into the Caribbean a few days ago here. I'm sure he knows a lot about local island effects based on his extensive experience and observation, but he sure comes across as a pompous jerk. All his examples are variations on, "Some idiot thought x, and therefore had a miserable time doing y, while through my superior knowledge I correctly did z and thus made it to my anchorage hours before he did." He cuts down his audience ("You yuppie cruisers have never done any real sailing and therefore don't realize...") and glorifies himself. The worst thing (at least from my point of view, as a meteorologist) is that he either doesn't understand, or deliberately misuses, meteorological terms. What got my goat the most was his constant use of the phrase "gradient wind" to mean "wind". I think he was trying to distinguish between synoptic-scale wind and local wind, but using the wrong term to do it. (Gradient wind is a theoretical construct, the wind which solves an equation balancing various forces.)
Everything still works. (I know, I've probably just jinxed us.) The only problem we're having is that our watermaker membrane leaks brine like crazy. It still makes water just fine; if it didn't, we'd have to go through the hassle of faxing and phoning and arranging for replacement parts to be shipped out, but our friends who have gone through this drill tell enough horror stories to convince us that we'd just as soon leave it until we get back to the US.
Another thing I'm going to do when we get back to the US is donate all this stupid canned food to a food bank. [Note: the day after I wrote this, a cruiser announced on the morning VHF net that he was organizing a food drive for a local orphanage. I am gleefully donating a bagful of cans.] We've used about 5% of what we brought. The fresh veggies lasted way longer than I expected, and we've eaten fish or lobster almost every night, courtesy of our resident spearfishing maniac.
What we shouldn't have bought so much of:
What we should have brought more of:
There are a few other things we need to buy more of that aren't too expensive here. But it really hurts to pay over $5 for a large cannister of rolled oats that was $2.50 back in Florida. Milk is $3.71 for a half gallon, when it's available, which is generally only for a day or so after the weekly mailboat's been in. Butter, on the other hand, is less than $2/pound.
On Wednesday, Sheryl from Colleen and I hitchhiked out to the agricultural packing house, about twelve miles away in Mount Thompson, which we had heard was the place to get fruit and veggies cheap. There's a lot of farming on Great Exuma, and the farmers all bring their stuff to the packing house, where it's crated and shipped out on the mailboat to Nassau. The grocery stores around the Exumas, including the one in George Town, buy their produce from the distributor in Nassau. So the green peppers sitting on the shelf at Exuma Market in George Town have already made the round-trip passage to Nassau. They even look like world travelers, a bit bruised and weary. By contrast, the green peppers at the packing house were all young and fresh and bursting with happy nutritious vitamins. All that, and cheaper too.
The packing house didn't have a huge variety of items, since they depend on the seasonal output of the local farmers, but we were able to buy red and green tomatoes, bell peppers, spring onions, bananas, and tiny sour tangerines. (There were also cabbages, but neither of us is a cabbage fan.) The prices were good by US standards and phenomenal by Bahamas standards, in part because the friendly woman at the packing house was rather liberal with her accounting. She was incredibly nice to us. When she heard we needed to hitch back to George Town, she found someone there who was just about to leave and practically ordered her to take us with her.
Hitchhiking turned out to be quite easy and fun. We started walking out of town and stuck our thumbs out, and everybody (other than taxis) stopped for us. The first woman apologized that she wasn't going very far, and we waved her on. The second car had a family in it, and we decided we wouldn't cram in on their kids in the back, so we waved them on as well. The third car pulled up, and a jovial black man opened the door.
His name, he said, was Sweet Papa George, and he was headed for the airport, where he worked. "But Mount Thompson ain't so far away, I'll take you there." He asked us lots of questions about our boats, and told us about his travels in the US. He loves to travel, he said, and goes to different places "just to see how the folks live there." He'd been to Nova Scotia, and to Baltimore, and to Sheridan, Wyoming, which he hadn't cared for much. "But I drove up into the mountains there and saw ice in the middle of the summer. Now that was something."
It's time for us to start thinking about traveling, too. There's some serious gravity here in George Town and it's tough to escape, but we finally made some plans with Whish to cruise the almost-uninhabited Jumento Cays, southwest of the Exumas. Luckily, we were able to pick up a decent guidebook to the Out Islands of the Bahamas, because the charts are terrible, and our general Bahamas guidebook devotes exactly one and a half pages to the whole Jumentos chain.
Our new guidebook (On and Off the Beaten Path) begins its section on the Jumentos, "I have a nagging feeling deep down that I shouldn't tell anyone how to get to this lovely, unspoiled island chain....Giving away [this] navigational information...is like giving away my daughter. Please take care of her." There's a tricky cut to get through which we can only do at high tide (luckily it's near the full moon, so the high tide is quite high), there are coral heads all over the place, and the anchorages are rolly and far apart. On the other hand, we've heard tales of colorful reefs swarming with fish and lobster, beautiful beaches, and amazing sunsets.
Needless to say, there aren't any phones until we get to Ragged Island, the one inhabited island in the group, so don't expect any updates soon. You'll just have to imagine us eating lobster while anchored off those white sand beaches, sipping rum drinks and watching the sunset. If that thought makes you too envious, feel free to imagine us nervously piloting through reefy shallows, or spending a sleepless night bouncing and rolling in a poorly protected anchorage. No doubt we'll be doing all these things in the weeks to come!