Man-O-War Cay
19 April 2018 | One of the many lovely homes on Man-O-War
We set out on our Abaco journey to visit all the islands and towns. The Abacos is so rich with opportunities to sail for a few hours to a different location, visit, meet new people and sample what the island offers.
We left Abaco Beach Resort, bound for Man-O-War Cay, The island has an internal harbour, nearly surrounded by land, but entered by a narrow inlet that is only passable in high tide. It is also a very unique island, originally settled by Loyalists escaping the Revolutionary war and they brought farming and ship building to the island. Man-O-War has been know as the boat building capital of the Bahamas since the 1800's, They still built boats on the island, the Albury Ship Building Company remains quite active and we see Albury boats all over the Abacos. The island also has one of the best repair yards in the Bahamas, Edwin's Boatyard, where we also got help to finally resolve our minor water pump problem. Turns out I had fixed it, BUT then proceeded to put it back together wrong, damaging an 'O' ring. Once again, you learn something new every day on the boat!
Man-O-War also has another unique feature, they are the only "Dry" island in the Bahamas. Well I should say almost Dry. You can't buy beer or liquor, there are no liquor stores like there are on every other island, but a year or so back the restaurants started selling wine and beer, much to the chagrin of many of the residents. It seems that Dock-N-Dine kept loosing business because they didn't sell any wine, beer or mixed drinks. The straw apparently came when a group of 18 sat down for dinner and when they found out there as no alcohol, they all got up and left the island ! So now the two restaurants on the island both offer wine or beer with dinner. The town is small and we walked all of it, visited the museum/coffee shop, the small grocery, the sail canvas shop with the ladies sewing away on their "assembly line" production and across the island to the beach on the Atlantic side. Man-O-War doesn't allow anchoring on the harbour so we picked up a mooring. The harbour is packed tight and it was a real experience watching the boat swing through one night's front with boats on both sides of us within a few feet of making contact. It was a bit harrowing, but they actually did a pretty good job of laying out the mooring field.