I Like Marsh Harbor
30 April 2012
Wiley
Marsh Harbor was not all that we expected.
We had been told that in the winter, as many as 500 boats can be anchored here. By that standard, the harbor seemed small to hold that many boats.
We had read that Marsh Harbor was the third largest city in the Bahamas, after Freeport and Nassau. This is true. However, the population is only about 5,000 people, making it less than one third the size of Geneva, Illinois the “small town” we live in.
We enjoyed a lovely dinner with our friends Merle and Barbara ashore (after a brief, impromptu “dingy race” to the restaurant dock in which Dimples with her 2hp outboard and attached “flotation tubes” did not fair well.) We enjoyed a lovely lunch at a harbor side restaurant - Mangoes since Curlytails was closed.
Unlike Green Turtle, Marsh Harbor is no “resort”. It has a gritty reality to it. At the floating dinghy dock (a courtesy of the Royal Marsh Harbor Yacht Club) kids, and on occasion, a troubled looking adult (other cruisers describe them as “winos”) wait, eager to grasp your dingy painter (line) with the expectation that you will tip them for this unwanted and unnecessary service. A nearby commercial site is surrounded by a chain-link fence with a coil of razor wire along the top, and an armored care with uniformed men AND REALLY BIG GUNS make pick-ups and deliveries at the local banks. The unemployment rate in the Bahamas is around 14%, and you see a lot of people here who, in material terms, don’t have much.
Yet almost everyone here still greets you with a bright smile and a friendly hello. Marsh Harbor has a fairly large, well-stocked grocery store, Maxwell’s Supermarket, hardware stores, and a store that sells DVDs of very recent movies in suspicious xeroxed paper packets (we did not buy any). If you get to the grocery store on Thursday or Friday there is plenty of fresh produce because the barges bring them in from the states on those days.
The Commonwealth of the Bahamas is NOT a third world country. It is a thriving democracy, with three constructive political parties (FNM, PLP, and DNA). they have an election coming up, and we watched political adds on TV at the bank. None of the adds were “attack adds”. Candidate posters are everywhere. Even in Marsh Harbor, the crime rate is low by U.S. standards. On our second day in Marsh Harbor, we watched some black Bahamian kids - ages maybe between seven and twelve- jump off a pier, swim underwater to the beach, and then come up laughing, joking, and then running out to the end of the pier to make another dive.
That is when I decided that I really like Marsh Harbor.
It didn’t hurt that a friendly Bahamian pharmacist filled two of my prescriptions that had run out, at a price with insurance paying nothing, which was 1/3 of the amount I pay “out of pocket” for the same medications AFTER my insurance has paid its share. The Bahamians are adding prescription drugs to their National Health Insurance next year, and will be paying for it with a modest increase in their taxes.
It makes you wonder if WE are the Third World Country.