For some, there’s no decision to be made: Whether it’s a once-in-a-lifetime cruise or an annual cycle, they never planned to go any farther than the Bahamas, and George Town is the turnaround spot. Others, planning to carry on, find one excuse or another to delay departure: one more potluck to attend, one more round of sundowners on the beach, one more piece of equipment to fix. They let one weather window slip by, and then another, until they finally turn north—homeward.
For us, George Town is where we need to decide if we want to continue cruising for a second year. It’s late March; we left Toronto just seven months ago. But if this is to be only a one-year cruise for us, we’re more than halfway through and it’s time to turn around and start back. Thanks to El Niño, I feel like I’ve had only the barest taste of idyllic cruising life—and already I have to decide whether I’m ready to commit to more, and harder. Though neither Steve nor I will admit it as we mock the organized routines of Camp George Town (“let’s organize a beach walk with scheduled stops for shell-collecting, aerobics, and a religious discussion”), stopping here has been a relief. By the time we arrived, we were ready for a rest, ready to settle into a routine, a word that hadn’t been in our vocabulary since we left Toronto. And even though we’ve been here almost a month already, the time for decision-making and moving on still seems to have come much too soon. Dithering isn’t an option: The coming of hurricane season demands a decision now; we have to be either much farther north or much farther south by the time it arrives in June. Steve is nervous but ready to go.
For all our cruising inexperience, Steve and I actually have an advantage: in the couple-relationship department. Keeping a boat running happily is, in many ways, like running a business, and we’re used to working together. We already have years of experience negotiating disagreements and trading off strengths and weaknesses. (I’d learned years ago that it’s embarrassing to cry in front of your coworkers.)
And so I revert to old form: I schedule a meeting. As the basis for discussion, I sit at the laptop and compose a 1,600-word memo setting out the pros and cons of continuing on versus turning north toward home. Very uncruiserlike, and downright radical behavior in a place so laidback one of the most popular T-shirts in the straw market reads: “Nobody move, nobody get hurt.”
Our closest friends are going the other way. Elizabeth and Don are returning to home base in the Chesapeake; theirs was a one-year cruise, with the Bahamas the only goal. Belinda and Todd have long since decided to head north, to cruise the Eastern Seaboard and the coast of Maine. “The boat’s not ready to go farther south, and neither are we,” Todd says.
I’m not convinced we’re ready either, but the meeting does the trick: We made it this far—despite my worries. Which, it seems, are the same old worries I had before we left Toronto. I’d be crazy to turn us back before our time is up.
The next week is a series of dinghy dashes from one of George Town’s anchorages to another, following up radio calls from people looking to unload stuff that we will now need. We zip over to one boat to get sturdy jugs for the extra diesel fuel we’ll be carrying on the longer passages ahead. Ed, their owner, waves off our attempts to pay with either cash or the bottle of rum I’ve brought as backup currency. “Just do something nice sometime to help out another cruiser,” he says. “That’s what this is all about.” Another cruiser, an American heading home, sells us a brand-new life raft. Yet another boat, this one returning from the Caribbean, has all but three of the navigation charts we need. Steve has spare engine parts shipped in; I take the dinghy and go to Spanish lessons on the beach—to bolster my rusty college vocabulary with phrases such as:
“El motor no funciona”
(The engine won’t run), “
Hay un mecánico diesel que hable inglés?
” (Is there a diesel mechanic who speaks English?), and “
Mi barco se está hundiendo
” (My boat is sinking).
D
ear Belinda and Todd: It’s been almost three weeks since you headed north, and we’re
still
in George Town. In fact, we’ve tried three times already to leave, but three times things have gone wrong . . .
The first time, our engine died as we were threading our way out Elizabeth Harbour, leaving us—quite literally—between a rock and a hard place. We had to zigzag our way back and anchor under sail—a little tension-wracked, skill-building exercise, something we had never practiced together before leaving home. First, twenty quick tacks required to keep us in the narrow, twisting channel of safe water, marked only by subtle color changes and landmarks on shore. With reefs or rocks on both sides, the turns had to be tight, precise, and fast. Steve, at the helm, was uncharacteristically tight-lipped when he wasn’t shouting instructions at me, and my knees were actually knocking as I waited for the next shout into action, knowing that I tended to be clumsy when I tried to be quick.
As he started each turn, Steve released the headsail, and as it blew across to the other side of the boat, I cranked it in on the winch, grinding it in with the speed of a woman possessed. “More, more,” he yelled each time, and even though the sheet was already taut and groaning, I put all my weight behind the winch handle and muscled the sail in a few inches tighter. Every inch made a difference in how close to the wind Steve could point the boat, and the closer to the wind, the farther from the reefs.
Then came the act of anchoring—completely stopping the boat in a particular spot without having an engine to throw in reverse to act as a brake on
Receta
’s 23,000 pounds. As Steve steered her toward an empty area of the anchorage, I furled the headsail—again, using a winch; again, at a speed I didn’t think I was capable of—to slow us down. He then ran forward to the bow to drop the 45-pound anchor, while I steered us directly, precisely into the wind, at which point the mainsail would be ineffective and
Receta
would essentially coast to a stop. Now to the reversing part, to put a backward pull on the anchor to set it in the sand. As Steve paid out the anchor chain, I backwinded the mainsail by putting my weight against the boom, which essentially started
Receta
coasting backward in the breeze. Pretty impressive stuff for a rank amateur, but once the hook was set and the adrenaline stopped flowing, I collapsed below for a 10
A
.
M
. nap.
By the next day, Steve had the engine started, and we up-anchored to take
Receta
on a test spin—only to have to return under sail and anchor under sail again. Our anchorage neighbors told me they thought we were purists who just didn’t believe in using an engine . . .
I can hear you laughing, Todd. Obviously these people didn’t know me very well.
Although I was lighthearted with our friends, by now I was seriously demoralized.
Receta
’s engine is actually the source of some of my greatest “sailing” fears—and the fact that it had stopped working before we even started down the Thorny Path had me
really
worried. It’s not just that the engine is old, and shoehorned under the steps in a way that makes working on it difficult even for professionals; it’s also that diesel mechanics aren’t Steve’s strong point. Completely confident in matters of sailing and navigation, he is learning as we go with “Mr. Engine, Sir,” as I respectfully refer to the smelly red beast in its presence, hoping to placate it. Seeing capable, confident Steve worried and unsure fuels my own anxieties.
He tried one thing after another to coax it back into action—no luck—dinghying into shore between troubleshooting attempts to call a mechanic in Florida who had done routine maintenance on Mr. Engine, Sir, for advice on what to try next. I again began to question our decision to continue south. What if something like this happened in a more remote, less repair-friendly spot? I envied the boats where one-half of the cruising couple was a mechanic, or an engineer, or anything but a magazine and book designer, a career that had almost zero applicability in our current predicament.
Finally
Steve diagnosed the problem—not the engine after all, but air in the fuel line from a cracked filter housing—and fixed it (luckily, he had another housing stowed in his spare parts bin), and we were nervously ready to leave again. This time, a phone call home revealed my father had been rushed into intensive care.
Dad recovered nicely, and a week later we were ready to leave again. Just twenty minutes outside the harbor, we got hit by a surprise squall—40 knots of wind, sideways-driving rain, daggers of lightning attacking the sea, huge steep waves that appeared out of nowhere. We’d never seen anything quite like it, except maybe on the cover of
Cruising World
magazine’s “Safety at Sea” issue: “How three boats got pulverized and what they did wrong.” The other boats that had left that morning realized the wisest course of action was to go back, to retreat to the safety of the anchorage. For us, there was no choice: I had become suddenly, violently seasick, completely incapacitated, leaving Steve to manage the boat in the squall by himself.
Strike three.
I don’t know, Belinda. Maybe someone is trying to tell us something. Maybe we’re not meant to go farther south. We’re licking our wounds, reevaluating our plans. But in the meantime, everything bad holds something good. Our aborted leavetaking means that we are still in George Town when the Family Island Regatta begins.
The Family Island Regatta is a traditional event that’s been held each April for more than forty-five years. The raceboats are tall-masted wooden Bahamian sloops, the kind once used as workboats in the islands. With bragging rights as well as cash at stake, supporters from each boat’s home island pour into George Town as the regatta approaches, and the town is reclaimed by the Bahamians, completely transformed from its cruiser-centric winter-season self.
Every day we go out in
Snack
to watch the races. The start line appears placid, almost still, the sloops apparently asleep at anchor with their sails down. But when the gun sounds, they spring instantly to life, the sails blossoming in seconds, opening like enormous white flowers, so lovely they make my throat catch.
With their minimal keels, these boats need to counterbalance the force of the wind on the acreage of sail. As many as twelve of the crew clamber outboard astride long narrow boards—called pries—that extend perpendicular from the boat on the windward side, their weight providing leverage to help keep the overcanvased boat upright. When the boat turns at the mark (the course is a big triangle), the crew scrambles off the pries and onto ones flung into position on the opposite side of the boat. The penalty for being slow is a capsize or even a sinking, so agility and quick reflexes, coupled with a certain amount of beefiness (the more weight outboard, the more upright the boat will stay and the faster it will go), are prized crew characteristics. Nerves of steel don’t hurt either—since all this is happening at high speed within inches of other boats.
Along with the other dinghies and powerboats that make up the regatta’s “spectator fleet,” we follow them from mark to mark. I’m driving, faster than I want to, so Steve can take photos. And when he has me position
Snack
just beyond the big orange float marking an end of the finish line, closer than I want to be, one of the racing sloops comes screaming right at us, a white bullet with a football field of sail above. It just about T-bones us before veering off nonchalantly at the last minute, the guys on the foredeck laughing and waving. They were just playing, having a bit of fun after a good race. The photographer, his eye happily glued to the viewfinder, didn’t flinch.
My heartbeat back to normal, we head into George Town. “You’d barely recognize it,” I e-mail Belinda and Todd. “Wooden shacks have sprouted all along the point.” Some are nothing more than serving counters, with yummy smells issuing from behind them; others have yummy smells
and
a handful of tables and chairs. Ribs, chicken, and snappers smoke away on long barbecues made from oil drums cut in half, while conch fritters—crunchy, deep-fried balls of dough with bits of conch hidden inside—bubble in big pots of oil, tended by oversized ladies. When the balls turn golden, they scoop them out, drain them for the briefest second, and pop them into brown paper bags that quickly become sodden with grease as we munch our way down the road. We feel duty-bound to try the fritters at two or three different spots, until we settle on our favorite, which has the highest conch-to-dough ratio.
Right at the water’s edge, where some of the smaller racing boats have tied up for the night, an apron-covered man turns out conch salad. His place of business is even more bare bones than the shacks—just a rough wooden table with a pile of conch shells to one side and a half-dozen yellow buckets to the other. When you place your order, he picks up a shell, knocks a hole in it, and removes the mollusk with a quick twist of his knife. A few more swipes and he’s got it cleaned, skinned, and dipped in one of his buckets to rinse off the slime. He then dices it finely with onion, tomato, green pepper, cucumber, and fiery goat pepper, adds a dash of Bahamian sea salt, and squeezes sour orange, sweet orange, and lime juice over the whole mixture, creating a briny/sweet, hot/cool, crunchy/chewy salad to go.
At another shack, a lethal mix of gin and coconut water is being ladled out of a Bahamian cocktail shaker (a five-gallon bucket). “Honey child, come go with me/Back to the West Indies/Baby can’t you see/I lost my strength and my energy/What I need is gin and coconut water, gin and coconut water . . .” proclaims a traditional island song. Like the Baha Men, who perform a version of it, we’re soon singing its praises.
Steve finds a fat wad of bills on the ground amidst the revelers dancing in the streets to the tunes that blare from speakers the size of Volkswagens. “It could belong to anyone,” he says. “Let’s give it to Mom.” We head for the Hugmobile, parked in its usual spot, a bit removed from the heart of the regatta action. In Williamstown, where her bakery is located, Mom is known for her good deeds as well as her bread and crullers. “This is for your church work,” Steve tells her, explaining he had just come upon the money in the road. “Praise the Lord,” she says. “
Praise the Lord
.” She gives him a big glazed doughnut—and a
very
big hug.