After ten hours and seven broken needles, the dodger is finally re-stitched and back on its frame. That Sailrite sewing machine is sure earning its keep; it would have been an impossible job by hand. As it was, it took both of us to manage the unwieldy mass of heavy Sunbrella cloth and clear vinyl, and to figure out exactly which piece went where -- kind of like doing a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces are the same color. For the most part it fit together; at least we didn't have any leftover bits, although there's one unexplained gap near one of the zippers, and we had to hide the uneven forward seam with a "racing stripe" of webbing. Nobody's going to mistake us for professional canvasworkers, but it will do.
We had started working on the repair at Conception, but it got far too rolly as the wind came around to the south, so we decided to go to Flamingo Bay at the north end of Rum Cay. Sailing without a dodger in 15-20 knot winds sure makes it a wet ride. Every time we went below or came back up, we had to be lightning-fast on the companionway hatch, closing it behind us as quickly as possible lest the spray (or worse, a splash) make its way inside.
We motored around the south end of the island and then put the sails up, making long tacks. I was a little put out by having to motor at the beginning, and kept carping at Britt, "Why don't we sail? We can just tack!" until he pointed out that another boat which had left shortly after us, under sail alone, was still way back there and getting smaller, tacking fruitlessly against the strong Antilles Current. We did sail most of the distance, though, until we got to the bay entrance and had to go directly into the wind.
Flamingo Bay is spangled with patch reefs, black circles against the turquoise water, and although they're very easy to spot it was somewhat nerve-wracking slaloming among them. Finding a place to anchor with enough room that we wouldn't swing into one was also an exercise, and actually putting down the anchors in the right places without running into a reef was even harder. Or at least, it seemed that way to me, back at the helm trying to figure out if Britt's hand signals really meant that he wanted me to drive into that coral patch. All this tension led to a breakdown of our usual silent, calm, friendly anchoring procedure, which is a nice way of saying that we got furious with each other and screamed a lot. Fortunately, we were the first boat in Flamingo Bay, and nobody overheard.
Conception Island is a land park, but not a sea park, so fish-hunting is legal (although that's not clear in all the guidebooks). It might as well not be, though, because most of the reefs are dead. This is doubly depressing because the reefs stretching north of the island are incredible, huge pillars and walls reaching from the bottom at 20-30 feet all the way to the surface. Yet the colors are muted, the coral pale and covered with silt. One speculation we heard was that the reefs were bleached by fishermen just trying to get a quick kill. Another was that it was just part of the worldwide reef die-off due to sea temperature changes and increased pollutants. Whatever the cause, it pained us to swim around such beautiful structure and see only a few fish.
We
actually had better luck at the patch reefs in the anchorage, where
there were many more fish than at the more spectacular reefs outside.
The coral looked healthier, too. Maybe all the nutrients coming out
of the sailboats helped! One day, after we'd dumped our
food trash overboard, we saw a huge stingray doing clean-up
duty. This guy was easily four feet across, maybe bigger, and it was
fun watching him run a tight pattern across the sand bottom,
vacuuming up all the goodies.
The reef health situation was almost exactly the opposite at Flamingo Bay on Rum Cay. The whole bay is a mess of reefs, but the ones closest to shore, by where the boats anchor, are all white and dead. As they stretch out north from the island, toward where the wreck of a Haitian freighter sits awash, they look better and better, and the reef structure itself is more spectactular, similar to that off the north end of Conception. We saw turtles and puffer fish, sharks and groupers. And it was here that we got the biggest lobsters we'd ever seen. Britt speared the 18-incher above (measured from head to tail -- antennae don't count) and then had a devil of a time swimming it back to the boat. It made three meals for us; we ate the tail for two days and then made a dinner out of the legs and antenna bases. Steamed with Old Bay seasoning, cracked open and dipped in garlicky melted butter, they were awesome.
A few days later, I caught a lobster just as long, but not quite as hefty. Britt and I were swimming around different sections of the reef, looking for dinner. It was getting late, and I wasn't seeing much, so I headed back to where Britt was -- then I saw the enormous lobster, walking across the bottom right under him. It's pretty rare to see a lobster out in the open rather than hiding in a hole. Britt didn't notice what was right under his nose until I pointed it out, and he gallantly let me "take the kill" and spear the bug. (Then he gallantly carried it back to the dink for me, because it was heavy!)
We've got to enjoy our spearfishing now, because we're almost out of the Bahamas. The next set of islands, the Turks and Caicos, forbid spearfishing completely, as do many Caribbean nations. We're hoping that we can still go fish-hunting in Puerto Rico and in Venezuela, but from here on out we'll be mostly imited to whatever we can convince to bite a lure on the end of the line.