We arrived in George Town on February 22, and although we are certainly not unhappy to be here, the place just doesn't hold the same charm for us as it did last year. A big part of the reason is our crippled outboard. Elizabeth Harbour is huge, and getting around at idle speed is an extremely slow, and usually wet, proposition. We have taken to moving the big boat around instead, over to town when we need to do errands, or over toward one of the beaches if there's an event we want to attend.
Yes, yes, there are those less fortunate who get by on 2.5-horsepower outboards, or even (gasp) rowing power, all the time. Not us. The first full day we were here, we moved over to town so we could check out the shops for parts. Unsurprisingly, nobody carries Suzuki parts. We ended up ordering a new propeller, plus some additional parts, from the outfit back in Annapolis where we originally bought the outboard.
The phrase, "we ended up ordering a new propeller," is deceptively short, because actually accomplishing the ordering took much of the day. Just telephoning the US from the Bahamas is a big chore, as a few months ago a phone tower collapsed on Staniel Cay, and it has not yet been replaced, resulting in long and tortuous routings which seem to only work about half the time. We also got a different story on "how to ship parts so that you don't have to pay duty" from each person we asked. Eventually we went with Exuma Markets' assurance that we should fax the sender a copy of our cruising permit, to be attached to the outside of the box, and of course this meant another half-hour of attempted telephoning, this time from Exuma Markets' fax machine, until we got an international line clean enough for fax transmission.
Some people are having a much worse time than we are. At around 2:00 a.m. on Sunday the 25th, a new J-30 (lightweight racing sailboat) on its maiden voyage out of Florida, with three men aboard, attempted to enter the harbor. Conch Cay Cut, the northern (and usual) entrance, has a lot of reefs that must be avoided; under good conditions, it's not difficult, but with 20+ knots of wind on a moonless night they either missed a crucial turn or were blown past it, and ended up on a reef. Sometime around 9 a.m. they were discovered -- they were sitting on a rock at the cut, flashing a signal mirror -- and several cruisers organized a rescue and alerted the local authorities. By then, their boat was badly holed, and their deck was awash.
Although everyone was rescued, the boat was in pretty bad shape, and of course their personal gear was a mess. Some cruisers spearheaded a drive to assemble donated clothing and toiletries for the shipwreckees, and in the afternoon a few large skiffs were rounded up to go salvage gear and attempt to raise the boat and tow it in for repair.
There is a lot we don't know about this situation, but the clear moral is that entering reefy harbors at night is a bad idea. (Not exactly a novel concept, considering that every guidebook and every chart stresses it!) We are certainly guilty of over-reliance on the GPS and computer navigation, and when we drove in through Conch Cay Cut we were certainly depending on the waypoints. Then again, we also were eyeballing the reef as verification, and when our eyeballs and GPS disagree we generally go with the eyeballs. We have become pretty bold about entering U.S. harbors at night, but U.S. harbors are just connect-the-dots games with all the markers and buoys, and the charts are amazingly accurate.
This was the third wreck at George Town this year, we heard. The hull of a cruising sailboat is up on the windward beach, high and dry and stripped of all equipment. We don't know the story on this one, but it's sobering to see someone's cruising dreams broken on the rocks.
We're hoping to get out of here soon, hoping that the horror stories we've heard about three-week deliveries and $200 shipping bills will not come down on our heads, hoping that we get all our parts and then instantly have a weather window open up for us. The likelihood of everything going according to plan, though, is pretty slim. At the moment, we don't even know if our engine parts have been shipped, and we're concerned we might have made a bad choice of carrier. But everything will get done, we will get our parts and our mail, and if we have to pay a ridiculous amount of money and wait a ridiculous amount of time, well, we'll just drown our sorrows with a couple of rum drinks.
In the meantime, we're enjoying the George Town social scene. A number of our friends are here: Ariel and Rhapsody, who we last saw in Miami, Nightwinds, who we last saw up in Fernandina, and Gratitude, who we haven't seen since New York City. Our friends from the boat Effie, who we cruised a lot with last year, flew down to join Ariel for a week; we'd seen them last at their house in Maine! We have also been trying to meet other boaters who are planning to go south into the Caribbean.
The official boat count here is up over 400. We recognize a lot of names from last year, and of course many cruisers spend the whole winter here every year. Then there are boaters who are just passing through on their way to the Caribbean, like us, and those who will continue to explore the rest of the Bahamas once they shake off the George Town gravity.
With all these boats, it's hard keeping everyone straight, especially on the radio. We've seen (or heard) Moonglow and Moongate, Sea Dancer and Star Dancer, Interlude and Winterlude, and even Catch 22 and Ketch 22. There's a Latitude, a Gratitude, and a Starboard Attitude. People keep getting Windom confused with Winsome, and then there are Winddrift, Windswept, Windchime, Windfree, and Windstar 4.
So for the next few weeks, Windom (that's us) will just hang out in George Town. But we look forward to seeing new shores soon.