On Monday, I paddled into Barraterre and bought a few items at the tiny general store there, thinking it would take two days to make the 30 miles to Georgetown. I had been hearing a lot about this town on the southern end of Great Exuma Island. Ben and his family considered it almost paradise, and he told me it was a mecca for cruising sailors who congregate there to wait for the right weather to make difficult windward trip to the Caribbean. I looked forward to seeing it for myself, and to seeing the Olsens again, as I expected them to be there when I arrived.
I left Barraterre with the wind at my back for a change. A cold front sweeping across North America brought the unusual change in wind direction. North winds are a rarity in the trade wind belt, and it takes an unusually strong front to reach this far south. I was eager to take advantage of such an opportunity to make easy miles, so I unpacked the parafoil kite that had been stowed on the rear deck all these months and began untangling the lines. I had experimented only a little with the parafoil, finding it frustrating in the variable winds of the Gulf of Mexico, but I knew that sea kayakers had used them as sails to make rapid downwind progress in the right conditions. So far on the trip, I had not had even a single day of steady tailwinds of sufficient strength, so the parafoil was almost forgotten.
Launching the kite from a kayak is the most frustrating part of parafoil sailing, and my previous attempts had resulted in tangled lines and attendant profanities when the kite plummeted into the sea each time the wind speed dropped. This time, however, it was different. I held the 10-square foot plastic kite at arm’s length in front of me, and the wind filled it with a snap, carrying it up and away from me. The 300-foot nylon line sang as it spun off the hand reel, and the kite rapidly climbed to a height of 100-feet above the waves, far out in front of my bow. I rested the paddle across the coaming and hung on to the reel as the kayak surged forward to an unheard-of cruising speed of 6 knots.
Barraterre dropped below the horizon in my wake, and soon I was in deep water about a mile off the coast of Great Exuma, enjoying the ride as I sat back and effortlessly moved at twice my paddling speed. The settlements of Rolleville and Steventon slipped past to starboard as I paralleled the rugged coast of the island. As I was only able to run before the wind, I was being carried farther from shore on my southeast heading as the beaches curved away to the south, but I didn’t care. I wanted to ride this wind as long as I could. Five miles out, beyond the reefs in oceanic depths, schools of flying fish skimmed over the waves in front of my bow, gliding easily a hundred yards at a time before disappearing again into the waves.
I reached Georgetown in just over five hours, covering 30 miles without dipping the paddle. The anchorage off Stocking Island was easily recognizable by the number of cruising sailboats present. There were at least 100. It was the only place in the Exumas where so many boaters gather. Not wanting to deal with a crowd and the many questions the cruisers would have when they saw me, I reeled in the parafoil just north of the anchorage and set up camp on the deserted beach there. After cooking and eating a simple dinner of rice and tuna, I turned on my VHF and tried to call Whisper. There was no answer from the Olsens, but the radio channels were alive with chatter from all the boaters in the area.
In the morning I paddled across the harbor from Stocking Island to the other anchorage at the edge of Georgetown. As I worked my way through the cluster of sailboats there, Mark, from Elske, called my name and I paddled over to go aboard for coffee with him and Lis. They said they had been there for two days, after an easy sail from Staniel Cay. Mark said that this anchorage near the town was called Kidd Cove (said to be a favorite anchorage of Captain Kidd) and there were almost as many boats anchored here as the 100 or so out at Stocking Island. Mark pointed to a small pocket of beach where I could land my kayak to go into town, so I said goodbye until later and paddled ashore. My first priority in this outpost of civilization was to find a laundry. My clothes had not been properly washed since Key Largo.
I left a garbage bag full of dirty T-shirts, shorts, and underwear at the full-service laundry, and set out to explore Georgetown. There was something familiar about this place, and then it struck me that the town was not at all unlike many rural Mississippi communities such as Prentiss, where I grew up. If not for the ocean and a few coconut palms here and there, I could almost imagine myself back in my hometown.
Near the center of Georgetown, a bridge passed over an inlet to a small bay where most of the dinghies from visiting yachts were tied up to a dock provided for this purpose. There were two grocery stores that were larger and better stocked than any I’d seen in the Bahamas, and other small stores were randomly spaced along the single main street north and south of the bridge. On one end of town there were government buildings and a post office, along with two small hotels, the Peace and Plenty and the Two Turtles Inn. The telephone office was on the opposite end of town, and away from the business areas, colorful tin-roofed houses, neat and well maintained, lined the streets.
Both the boaters and the locals walked at the same unhurried pace. A T-shirt stand sold shirts that encouraged this behavior: “Georgetown Bahamas – Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt.” It seemed that people here took this philosophy seriously. Nothing seemed important enough to justify expending extra energy.
Georgetown lies only a few miles north of the Tropic of Cancer. I was excited about being so close to the official tropics, and looked forward to crossing that demarcation line soon. But though there were coconut palms and other exotic plants, Georgetown didn’t seem any more tropical than the other islands I had seen miles to the north. I couldn’t quite see it as the paradise Ben Olsen had raved about, but it was a pleasant enough place to hang out for a while, and there was certainly no lack of fellow boaters to swap sea stories with. I recognized many faces that I’d seen in the past two weeks as I worked my way south, but far more people recognized me. Many were total strangers who said things like: “Aren’t you the guy paddling the kayak?” or, “We saw you a couple of weeks ago at Allen’s Cay… you paddled all the way to Georgetown from there?”
Unbeknownst to me, word of my solo journey had spread like wildfire throughout the Exumas yachting community, propagated by ham radio operators and word of mouth exaggerations. Most of these sailors were unfamiliar with sea kayaks, and were amazed at my ability to paddle through the same islands they were sailing among in much larger and infinitely more expensive and complicated vessels. I didn’t know it that first day in Georgetown, but I would soon be repeating my story so many times that I would grow tired of hearing it.
Finding a place to camp in Georgetown did not seem likely, so I paddled back across the harbor to Stocking Island and landed on the “Volleyball Beach” that Ben had mentioned in his descriptions of Georgetown. Someone had erected two volleyball nets one year, and it had been a tradition ever since among the yachties to gather at 3:00 p.m. for a couple of hours of informal games. I arrived at the time of this competition, and was surprised to see how many people had turned out. Each of the four teams consisted of 10-12 players, and another two dozen spectators watched from the sidelines.
Not wanting to pitch my tent too close to this activity, I found a spot just around a long sandy point out of sight of the volleyball nets. A grove of tall casaurina trees provided shade, and someone had hung a tire swing from a branch for the kids, and a crude tree house was nailed between the branches of another tree. I quickly took possession of the area, stringing my hammock between two trees, setting up my tent, and digging a fire pit in the sand for cooking.
Behind my campsite, the beach gave way to island scrub forest. Just inside the tree line I found an unusual signpost set up by one of the cruisers who had too much time on his hands. A chunk of island limestone hung by a string from the sign, which proclaimed the stone to be a “weather rock.” Handwritten instructions were posted for skippers needing meteorological information:
“Weather Rock:
If it’s wet – it’s raining. If it’s dry – it
’s not…
If it’s hot – the sun is shining.
If it’s hanging straight down – there is no wind…
If it’s out at angle – there’s good wind for sailing.
If it’s straight out – it’s a hurricane!
If there’s ice on it – this ain’t the Bahamas and it’s time to sail south!”
The heavy rock wasn’t out at the slightest angle, despite the strong breeze that threatened to blow my tent away. I couldn’t stake it down in the deep powered coral that made up the sand of the beach, so I gathered piles of rocks and empty conch shells to weight down the corners. People from the volleyball game began wandering over as I gathered materials for a cooking fire. Everyone wanted examine my kayak and gear, and they all seemed to ask the same questions. There would be no privacy here, as in addition to the visitors on the beach, there were several sailboats anchored close by in the 20-foot depths just beyond the shallows in front of my tent. I didn’t mind the company for now though. I craved conversation after so much time spent alone.
I planned to stay in Georgetown no longer than 2 or 3 days, but after this time had passed, I was not anxious to leave. I learned that Georgetown’s anchorage was also known as “Chicken Harbor” by serious voyagers, because of the large number of Canadian and American yachtsmen who sail there on their way to the Caribbean from Florida and then “chicken out” and go no farther. This is because south of the Exumas, the islands are more widely spaced and stronger trade winds straight out of the southeast make progress down island a head-on bash into rough seas. The route from the Bahamas to the Virgin Islands and points beyond in the eastern Caribbean has long been known as the “Thorny Path” because of its difficulty. The sailors who “chicken out” at Georgetown to go no farther south are not in want of like-minded company. In winter, when the trades are blowing their strongest, 300 or more yachts often congregate in these waters, their crews making excuses to stay longer, passing the time with volleyball and partying.
Deprived of social interaction during much of my solitary journey, I was more interested in the latter pursuit. I learned that on Friday nights, the Two Turtles Inn in Georgetown is the place to be. That was the time of the weekly Friday night barbecue, when all the boaters congregated to swap dreams and sea stories amid a free-flowing torrent of rum and beer. I went to the barbecue my first Friday night in Georgetown with Mark and Lis, who had been joined that day by Mark’s sister, Lisa. Lisa had just flown in from Norfolk to spend a couple of weeks sailing on Elske, and was easily recognized as a newcomer to the islands by her snow-white, untanned skin. Mark was beginning to be infected by the “chicken” fever that was going around in Georgetown, and was having doubts about continuing on to the Virgin Islands after listening to too many tales of disaster spread around by some of the older salts in the harbor. Elske, Mark explained, was built in 1933, and her old wooden hull might not stand the pounding of motoring head-on into wind and waves for several hundred miles. He suggested that he might consider going on if he had another man on board to help, but didn’t know if Lis and Lisa could pull their share of all-night watches. It was an invitation, and I told him I would consider it, but I had been aboard Elske enough to note the dilapidated condition of the once-beautiful old vessel. I wouldn’t say so, but I felt safer in my kayak.
Though I wasn’t eager to join Mark on Elske, despite the arrival of his good-looking sister, I was already thinking of the possibility of hitching a ride on some other sailboat. Everyone warned me that I would not be able to make the 80-mile crossing from the Caicos to Hispaniola against the wind, and even if I could, there were only a few ports on the north coast of the Dominican Republic where foreign vessels were permitted to land. I was told that I would never be able to get permission to paddle the coastline of that country, so my best bet would be to go as crew on a sailboat and then resume my paddling in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory. Even John Dowd had warned me before I left home about potential problems on the tightly restricted coast of the Dominican Republic. His group of four paddlers had been arrested there, despite the letter of permission they had obtained in advance from the Dominican navy.
My dwindling cash supply was another reason to consider crewing on yacht to Puerto Rico. It would take another 2-3 months to paddle there, by which time I would be broke, or I could hop a ride on a faster boat able to take a more direct route and possibly get there in 2-3 weeks. Once there, I could find a way to earn some more money and then continue on by kayak. There were quite a few boats in the harbor going down island, but I was to learn that cruiser-types don’t stick to a tight schedule, and most only had vague plans at best. I mingled with the crowd at the Friday night barbecue and put the word out that I was seeking a passage. Then I returned to my campsite, zigzagging across the dark waters of the harbor at 2:00 a.m., more than a little tipsy from the rum drinks that were somehow hard to keep track of.
My days in Georgetown were filled with exploring the immediate area on foot and by kayak, and meeting so many people I could no longer keep their names straight. I went to the afternoon volleyball games and sometimes joined in. Everyone wanted to know more about my trip and my reasons for traveling this way instead of in a more conventional boat, so I had numerous invitations for dinner and drinks aboard the yachts in the harbor, and could probably have stayed as long as I wanted without ever having to cook another campfire meal. I usually made my own breakfast, however, and spent the mornings hanging around camp, reading in my hammock or snorkeling in the clear waters just off the beach.
One afternoon while napping in my hammock I was awakened by a piercing Tarzan yell and looked up to see a big French-speaking guy about my age climbing down from the nearby tree house to where his attractive blonde girlfriend awaited. Switching to English, he introduced himself as Jean-Louis, saying they were both from Switzerland, and that his girlfriend spoke no English. Jean-Louis was ecstatic about my kayak and my journey, saying that he hunted ducks from a similar craft as a boy. I answered his questions and he rapidly translated my answers to the girl, who stared at me with wide blue eyes and a shy smile that suggested she might prefer my company to the loud-mouthed maniac by her side. Jean-Louis bragged that he had sailed around the world three times already, and embellished his voyages with tales of a shipwreck in his first boat off the coast of New Guinea. He claimed that he and a different girlfriend reached shore in a life raft and walked 50 miles of uninhabited coast to reach a native village.
Jean-Louis dressed in a flamboyant style to match his yarns of adventure, with a multi-hued Hawaiian-print shirt, equally loud flower-print trousers, sandals, and bougainvillea flowers woven into his foot-long ponytail. The girlfriend, still standing there in silence, was much more conservatively dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. As we talked, the one other member of their crew walked into my camp from where he had been wandering on the beach. His name was Scully, and he was a Rastafarian from the island of Dominica, out in the far eastern chain of Caribbean islands known as the Windward Islands.
Scully wore nothing but a pair of cut-off shorts, and evidently had never owned a pair of shoes, judging by his broad, calloused feet that enabled him to walk over the sharp coral rocks at the water’s edge in front of my camp. Dominica had been high on my list of desirable islands to visit when I planned this trip. I listened eagerly to Scully’s descriptions of his homeland. It was an island of jungle paradise, according to him, with abundant fruit, good drinking water cascading in streams from the mountains, and plenty of places where I could camp out of my kayak indefinitely.
Scully didn’t have the long dreadlocks typical of a Rasta, and he explained that this was because the authorities in Dominica had caught him with ganja and cut his hair. It was the worst possible punishment for him, as he had been growing his dreadlocks all his life. But Jean-Louis had plenty of ganja on board the Spirit of Sinbad, and Scully had joined him and his quiet girlfriend in Martinique, in hopes of seeing Florida. Georgetown, just 5 miles north of the Tropic of Canc
er, was as far north as Scully had ever been.
The Spirit of Sinbad was an unlikely-looking vessel for this young and obviously unemployed crew. Jean-Louis explained that the 52-foot aluminum-hulled racing yacht had been sunk and that he salvaged and repaired it at a bargain price. They were on their way to Miami, where they planned to work for awhile, then buy cheap jewelry to trade later on as they made their way around the world. Jean-Louis claimed to be a modern-day version of the sailing merchants of old, buying cheap items in one country and selling them for a profit at the next landfall where they were not available. He offered to take me with them, saying my kayak would easily fit inside the huge yacht, and that they could use an extra crewmember. The prospect of seeing the South Pacific was tempting. But I had little money, they obviously had none, and I did not want to return to Florida, even for a day.
In addition to these new friends, other cruisers I’d met farther north in the Exumas chain were showing up again in Georgetown. One morning while paddling across to Georgetown, I saw Whisper sailing into the anchorage and later caught up with the Olsens in town and walked with them to the post office. While there, I ran into Lawrence Pitcairn and his daughter Laura, from Heron I. It was good to see people I knew again, but there was no mail held for me under general delivery, and I was disappointed to have no news from my friends back in the other world I had left behind.
Later that same day, Mark, Lis, and Lisa moved Elske from Kidd Cove and dropped anchor just off the beach in front of my camp. Mark told me about the recent arrival of a sailboat called Foxglove, skippered by a fellow from Maine with his 19-year-old blonde daughter, Becky, and her brunette friend of the same age, Christine. After making sure we were out of earshot of Lis and Lisa, Mark told me the rumor he had heard about Foxglove. Becky’s father, divorced from her mother, had recently met a woman who wanted to move on board Foxglove and cruise the islands with him. Expecting her to arrive in Georgetown soon, he had recently given Becky and Christine notice that their vacation was over and that they needed to start thinking about a trip back to Maine. Mark said that he had seen the soon to be castaway crew and he assured me that these two single young women were the hottest in the anchorage, if not all the Bahamas, and not wanting to go back to New England in February, they were looking for berths on another boat. Mark’s dilemma was how to get rid of Lis and Lisa, so he could offer these poor girls a ride. I would be welcome to join him if he succeeded.
On Island Time: Kayaking the Caribbean Page 13
