In my last post, I left off with Victory anchored at Wrightsville Beach, part way through her passage down the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) with s/v Santiago from Norfolk, VA to West Palm Beach, FL. I’m going to set that thread aside for a moment and write in “real time” from our present position in Hatchet Bay, the island of Eleuthera, in the Bahamas, on Tuesday, April 4, 2023. I’m going to write about a day that has given us a huge helping of exactly the kind of experiences that motivated the First Mate and I to retire early (way early for me) and live on a shoestring budget aboard our slow-moving sailboat. I’m going to write about a perfect day. That day was today.

Technically, we are actually anchored in Hatchet Bay Pond - the actual Hatchet Bay is on the other side of a peninsula that juts out from the island of Eleuthera into the turquoise waters of the Great Bahama Bank. The settlement of Alice Town sits on this peninsula. The Pond is open to the Bank only through a narrow, fifty foot wide channel blasted through the limestone that makes up all of the islands of the Bahamas, so Alice Town has a welcome sign that includes the motto “home of the country’s safest harbour.” Except nobody calls the Pond the Pond, and nobody calls Alice Town by its proper name either, including the people who live here. The anchorage and the town are both known simply as “Hatchet Bay.”

Now what makes for a perfect day? For me, there are a few simple ingredients, well mixed. First, there is being some place new, some place where I don’t live and that I have never been before. A place rich with texture - new sights and sounds that you can imbibe while walking about. Second, there has to be contact with the people that live in that place. I am painfully aware that we cruisers are in truth still tourists, albeit if a decidedly different sort, but I want to try to meet the people who live in these places as something other than a wallet passing through. So far, our success rate seems to be surprisingly good. The technique we have been using here in the Bahamian Out Islands is obvious and simple. We walk. We wave at people in cars and call out “hello” to people on porches and say “hi” to fellow pedestrians. We talk to people in stores, shops, and bars. Maybe this won’t work everywhere we will travel. Maybe we are being naive, thinking it is working here, where most people seem to be pretty friendly, or at least polite. It helps, I’m sure, that English is spoken here, but I am working on learning other languages for other places, where I’m hoping this strategy will still work. My Spanish is getting pretty good, and I might have enough French to get by…

Now, before I go much farther, I should reveal that the perfect day actually started the night before, at the risk of spoiling my literary device for this anecdote. The previous afternoon in Hatchet Bay had been largely devoted to a sweltering three mile hike out and back on the Queen’s Highway, with our laundry on our backs, to a laundromat that thankfully also sold ice cream cones at a tolerable price. Many things are very expensive in the Bahamas, so we stocked up before we left the U.S., but it seems that if you minimize eating off the boat, buy the same foods the locals buy at grocery stores, shower in the cockpit, and stay out of marinas, you can cruise here in the Bahamas pretty economically. Anyway, we met a young mother at the laundromat and played peekaboo with her daughter, then as we hiked back, we happened upon Da Spot outdoor bar where the owner was making a conch salad for the crowd he expected to come by after dark to watch some Final Four college basketball. These two hot and thirsty cruisers immensely enjoyed drinking some ice cold beverages since we currently do not have refrigeration on Victory, while talking with this gentleman, whose name has sadly slipped my mind, about his life on Eleuthera, and how Hatchet Bay has changed from a burgeoning settlement to a much quieter place through the years. Then we listened as the first basketball fans to arrive recounted a hair-raising tale of a recent car accident nearby. We then said goodbye to all and headed back to Victory. In retrospect, I wish we had stayed for the game, but the power was cutting in and out and cruising seems to make waking up with the sun the norm, which tends to pair naturally with being in bed reading by sundown, so we said our goodbyes and headed back to the boat.

When we woke up at sunrise for what would officially be our perfect day, I brewed up the morning coffee, black, squeezed into our mugs through an AeroPress, a gadget rather like a French press. While I made the coffee, Monica adjusted Vic’s main boom to ensure that it wouldn’t throw its shadow on our solar panel so that we could replenish the energy we had drawn out of our “house” battery bank during the night. I fired up the water maker (desalinator) to more or less replace the water we had used from our water tanks the day before. Over a breakfast of Cream of Wheat thickened with Grape Nuts with a side of canned corned beef hash (remember, no refrigeration), we downloaded and studied the NOAA weather maps and the all important raw weather model data from the number one rated European Centre for Medium Range Forecasts (ECMWF). We generally look at weather forecasts at least twice a day, because weather rules our lives. Then we headed back into town.

We left Victory with the Captain rowing Victory’s tender Defeat for the sake of getting an upper body workout. Recall that Defeat is an inflatable dinghy and the bald truth is that rowing her does not give me the same joy that rowing her predecessor, the fiberglass rowing/sailing dinghy Percy, did. On the other hand, rowing seems to be my thing no matter what, and having a clear deck with Defeat in her bag below while we are underway has been amazing! We can see so much better when we are not peering over or around Percy, and going forward to work at the mast when Victory is heeled over with the wind is no longer a precarious proposition. So, I miss you Percy, I really do, but does anybody want to buy a lovely hard dinghy?

Our first stop was a cave Mother Nature has carved out of the occasionally steep sides of the harbor. We were equipped with Victory’s handheld spotlight and intrepid spirits, but it turned out that there was no safe landing place for Defeat due to the jagged and eroded limestone at the cave’s mouth. A bit disappointed, we continued on to tie up at the dock at Farrington’s Boater’s Haven. The Haven was actually closed for five days, as we had learned talking to folks there on arrival day, when we went ashore with Joe and Juliette of the Shannon 43 Tara, one of the big sisters of our Shannon 38. It was kind of fun to be the little sister after spending time with one of our own little sisters, Kiwi Ken’s Shannon 28, Southern Journey (see previous posts). So we knew that owner Emette Farrington’s wife and his son, who runs the bar, and the also gentleman who cooks the food, were all away and Emette was going to have a rest. Nonetheless, Emette was out on his restaurant patio and happy to give us some docking advice.

Our next stop was the grocery store. We weren’t exactly sure where it was, but a man with an amazing cloud of snowy white hair was happy to point us in the right direction. We picked up a few treats at the grocery. For example, we passed on the $10 packages of American cookies, but picked up a few $1.50 a pack cookies and noted that we could get potatoes, onions, and garlic bulbs at a reasonable price, but bell peppers (sweet peppers in the Bahamas) were too dear for our budget. We then went to hang out at a beach on the actual Hatchet Bay side of the settlement for awhile. On the way, we saw the snowy haired man again, sitting with some friends on a porch, and shared a few remarks about the day’s beautiful weather in passing.

After enjoying the sea breeze on the beach and meeting a few local cats and dogs, we decided to go have a look at the decrepit government dock from onshore. We didn’t make it to the dock. Instead, we met an older man and a younger man working on the foundation for some structure on the edge of town. They were listening to a piano piece that turned out to be by Beethoven on a portable radio, and we stopped to tell them how much we liked the music. The young man, Matthew, had been born in Florida but had followed his mother upon her return to the settlement after a divorce two years prior. Matthew was in the process of reacquiring his grandfather’s farm through a process that sounded a lot like homesteading. I talked to him about the details of his dreams of creating a ranch while Monica fell into a separate conversation with the older man. It turned out that he was one of the deacons of the local Baptist church and a cousin to Emette over at the Boater’s Haven. The structure that he and Matthew were building was to be a memorial to those who died when the Cuban jets sank the Bahamas Defense Force boat Flamingo in 1980 after it intercepted some government owned boats fishing illegally in Bahamian waters. Deacon Cladwell had been a seaman on the Flamingo and a survivor of the attack. He’s written a book about the horrible incident. We found it here: https://www.amazon.com/Because-10Th-1980-Flamingo-Incident-ebook/dp/B094XQ8RPM/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Cladwell+farrington&qid=1680660908&sr=8-1.

We also met Deacon Davis, who pedaled up on a bicycle as Deacon Cladwell and Matthew piled their tools into a wheelbarrow to call it quits for the day. We asked these men where we might get some lunch and they recommended Monica’s Dis and Dat about five miles north of Hatchet Bay in Gregory Town. We all had a good laugh about the coincidence with Monica’s own name. Although a ten mile round trip walk seemed a little much on a hot afternoon, the deacons told us we should hitchhike. Our first attempts at catching a ride on the Queen’s Highway didn’t actually succeed, so Deacon Cladwell flagged down a couple of men in a car coming out from the settlement. We climbed into the car and watched the Deacon and Matthew head back into town with their wheelbarrow. We were soon rocketing down the Queen’s Highway at 100 kph (about 63 mph), which got us to Gregory Town in no time. These guys dropped us off at our destination and one of them came in with us, but they were the least friendly people we met on the perfect day. Perhaps they resented being pressed into service by Deacon Cladwell.

At Monica’s Dis and Dat, Monica met Monica, who made a very reasonably priced lunch for us that she disparagingly called “finger food”, but we were quite happy to have some cheeseburgers and fries. We spent an hour, maybe more, sitting on Monica’s screened porch talking to her sister Frances while various people came and went. Frances is a woman that my grandmother, also named Frances, would have called a “pistol.” Frances was incredibly funny and engaging, telling us of her travels, her family, and Eleuthera during the time of COVID, and it was a shame to bid farewell to her and Monica (her sister when she is good but just a friend when she is bad), but we feared we were going to have a five mile walk back and had better get started.

It turned out that we needn’t have worried. As we walked down the Queen’s Highway, we tried our thumbs again and an American woman named Liz building a house with her husband at Surfer’s Beach picked us up. At first she was only willing to take us to Surfer’s Beach, which was fine with us, but she and her husband were actually in Eleuthera via their own sailboat, so she decided to give a couple of fellow sailors a ride all the way back to Hatchet Bay.

When we got back to Emette’s place, we found him talking with a Canadian couple, Geoff and Ruth, that had just come into the harbor in a Prout catamaran of the same vintage as Victory. Catamarans were a lot different back then, hardly the “floating condominiums” they are today. Geoff and Ruth are bound for Guatemala, planning to spend the hurricane season, as many do, on the Rio Dulce. It turns out that we really should make up some “boat cards” to exchange with the fellow cruisers we are meeting. Amid a lot of joking about his day off, Emette showed us and Geoff and Ruth his garden and then broke out his guitar and played his signature song about Eleuthera. As a guitarist and something of a poet myself, I’d say Emette is a talented musician and songwriter, with a really engaging stage presence, and each song he played was better than the last. You can actually find some YouTube videos of his playing, though they are of relatively poor quality and we think he was a lot better live. As Emette played, there was a steady stream of local folk stopping by for one reason or another, including a woman who had just returned from getting medical treatment for serious burns in Nassau and cousin Allen, who called Emette “boy”, prompting Emette to explain some of the local jargon to us.

By this time the perfect day needed to come to an end, since the sun was going down and we knew we would be swarmed by mosquitoes in Defeat if we didn’t get back to Victory fast. So here I am, recounting the highlights for you. Were we walking wallets just passing through? Maybe, but it didn’t feel like it, especially when we hung out for a while at Da Spot and got to know Matthew, Deacon Cladwell, Frances, and Monica a bit. You can be the judge, but for me, it felt like a perfect day.