5/16/00 | The Abacos

• 5/8 Lynyard Cay
• 5/9 Tilloo Cay
• 5/10-12 Marsh Harbour
• 5/12-14 Baker's Bay, Great Guana Cay
• 5/14-16 Manjack Cay

just like the US, only warmer

We're finally in the Abacos, but it's hard to believe we're still in the Bahamas. If it weren't for the hills and everyone driving on the wrong side of the road, we'd think we were in Florida.

In the rest of the Bahamas, most of the cruisers are on sailboats, with the occasional trawler and the even more occasional huge motoryacht. Here we've seen more powerboats than we have since the ICW, including cigarette boats and jetskis, and we get waked frequently by rude powerboaters. Not that there aren't rude sailboaters too -- one night a catamaran anchored near us played loud country music until well after 10 pm. Abaco is close enough to Florida to be a week-of-vacation destination, and there are charterboat bases here as well, so many of the boaters here are on short-time visits; maybe they just haven't gotten into the groove of the low-impact life.

The Abacos are considerably more developed than the Exumas and the other islands we've visited. The homes look Floridian and expensive, pastel stucco and Spanish tile, and they dot nearly every cay and bit of coastline. Many Abaco Bahamians are white, but there are also a lot of expatriate Americans who own vacation estates out here and speak like Texas and New York. Even the water falls short of what we've come to expect in the Bahamas. No longer blue, it's greenish and not as clear as before.

True, there are more grocery stores and hardware stores in Marsh Harbour than there are in the entire Bahamas south of Nassau. Prices are better than anywhere else in the Bahamas, and in some cases even better than in the US. There is a Subway sandwich shop and a Pizza Hut. On the other hand, a net connect here costs $3/minute. Hey, I've got my priorities.

oops, there goes our waterline

We dinghied in to Little Harbour to see Randolph Johnson's sculpture gallery and have lunch at Pete's Pub, where we met up with many of the other cruisers that had crossed over from Eleuthera with us. Over beer and burgers, we all came up with a plan to go snorkeling at Sandy Cay, a land and sea park (no fishing) about three and a half miles from our anchorage at Lynyard Cay. That's a long dinghy ride; since we needed to get Windom up toward Marsh Harbour anyway, we decided to drive the big boat up, anchoring temporarily at the marginal anchorage at Sandy Cay, then continuing on after our snorkel stop. Nobody else wanted to move their boat, so we offered to ferry people and tow their dinghies to Sandy Cay. We figured we could handle a few extra bodies and boats. Before we knew it, six boats had taken up our offer!

We had thirteen people aboard, a new record for us. Windom sat quite a bit lower in the water than usual. With seven dinghies clustering behind, like a crowd of puppies all jostling for a teat from Mom, our poor Yanmar diesel was huffing and puffing like the Little Engine That Could. At cruising RPM, which usually gives us over 6 knots, we were barely making 4.5. But eventually we made it to the reef, where we saw a humongous grouper and an absolutely monster lobster, in addition to the usual reef denizens.

we'll leave the light on for you

The next day, we finally arrived at Marsh Harbour, the third largest town in the Bahamas, and the first place we'd been since Nassau that had traffic lights. We took advantage of the grocery and hardware stores, and changed the oil since we could dispose of the used oil at a gas station. But the real reason we were in Marsh Harbour was to pick up our first cruising guest: Britt's dad, Gene, will spend the next two weeks with us.

As soon as we got him aboard, we headed out to Baker's Bay, on Great Guana Cay. (There is a Great Guana Cay in the Exumas, too. Not to mention about half a dozen each Rat Cays and Hog Cays.) Baker's Bay was dredged out by a cruise line company which built a gorgeous facility for their guests on the north end of Great Guana Cay. Wood and tile walkways lead from the huge dock to lovely and well-made buildings scattered around the island: a beautiful amphitheater of rough-hewn logs, a tiki bar surrounded by fragrant red flowers, dining rooms and cafeterias and stages, basketball courts and playgrounds. Built in 1989, it was abandoned in 1993, and the jungle is doing its best to reclaim the land. Hurricane Floyd helped by uprooting a few trees and tossing them across the buildings, but for the most part everything looks eerily intact under the overgrown vines.

We had a few nearly windless days at Baker's Bay and at Manjack Cay, 20 miles to the north, so we introduced Gene to the joys of snorkeling. Great reefs line the ocean side of the Abacos, but they can only be visited in calm weather. The reef off Manjack Cay rose abruptly from 25 feet of sand to within 4 feet of the surface -- definitely a hazard to navigation! But it was full of caves and crevices, with elkhorn coral pinnacles and colorful sea fans waving in the current. Schools of chub and surgeonfish swam back and forth, and I saw two sea turtles and a couple of squid. Britt did his usual magic with the pole spear, so Cafe Windom was assured of fish on the menu for the next few days.