A brief tour of Green Turtle Cay
05 February 2010
• Green Turtle Cay, Bahamas
by Mike
A note to those of you that have been missing photos: Please go out and check the photo gallery. Barb has been taking loads of pictures and we have been doing our best to load them to the blog. Plus I have finally figured out how to post videos etc. to the daily postings so if you go back through the previous postings you may find that I have added a film clip or two. They may not all be there right away but please keep checking.
I awoke this morning to the sound of roosters crowing, bright sunshine and the news that the Whale was going to be impassable today. Rats! A check of the weather forecast indicates that we are more likely to be going tomorrow morning or perhaps even a little later. In fact it now would appear that we will be here until Sunday morning. This is a very nice place to get stuck if you have to get stuck, I'll just have to figure out how to pay for it. The objective will be to get into Marsh Harbour by nightfall and it really isn't all that far. This morning really early might have been a good time to go but we would never have gotten out of the channel into Black Harbour. In fact that will be a major consideration for whenever we choose to leave. We will have to plan for two bottlenecks: the entrance to the sound here which can only be traversed on a high or close to high tide and the Whale Cay Channel which needs little tidal current and winds from the south or west.
On the plus side, I have never seen such clear water! If it weren't for the ripples on the surface you'd think Nelleke was floating eight feet above the bottom. You can sit on the deck and watch the fish swimming around the pilings of the dock and nuzzling up to the hull of the boat. In fact I almost didn't need to dive on the hull to check out if we had damaged anything in powering over the skinny biot last night (we didn't). By the same token but other side, the internet here seems to be on Island Time too, Mon. I have a great connection and strong signal but to load a particular website seems to take foreven and half the time the load times out. Apparently although you have a great connection between your computer and the local hotspot they still have to go through the Island TelCo and they only have so much bandwidth. Oh well - in through the nose and out through the mouth....go to your Happy Place, Mike!
Today, thanks to the generosity of Barry and Marcia, we had a golf cart ride into New Plymouth, the main town on Green Turtle. As Barry put it, Marsh Harbour may be larger, but it is a new town and New Plymouth is a sizable island community that still has the appearance and architecture of what they all looked like 50 years ago. There are a couple of grocery stores, a couple of hardware stores, some museums and loads of restaurants and bars. We arrived on the day that the barge arrived with fresh goods for all the stores so we picked up a few things to bring back to Nelleke. The drive to town skirted the Atlantic shore and we were able to look out and see why today wouldn't be a good day to try to get through the Rage at the Whale Channel. We could see the surf breaking with large waves on the reef just offshore of which the Whale Cay is part of. I can only imagine what trying to traverse it in these conditions would be like and it is supposed to get worse over the next 48 hours before getting better. Ergo, tonight we will remain at the dock and I think that we might have found someone to rent us a mooring for Friday and Saturday and I expect that the wind generator will be doing its job on both those nights.
Gerry from Patty Jean heads home tomorrow so tonight will be quite a party and Barry has agreed to provide the music. So we are going to eat our dock again and have a farewell party for Garry.
Comments