Blues
We haven’t always been able to have all sails up, but it’s sure pretty when we do.
When I was a kid, I had a child’s Odyssey in which Homer baffled me with his constant refrain of “the wine-dark sea.” My 64-crayon collection served as my Pantone catalog, Crayola my authority on color vocabulary. Wine had absolutely nothing to do with water, miracles aside. My go-to ocean colors were the fraternal twins blue-green and green-blue.
My home waters draw from a very different palette.
The ocean water of my actual experience in Gloucester, Massachusetts, was mostly olive-green, with silvery glints reflecting the predominantly grey sky. On a sunny day the surface of the water could be a solid sparkling navy. When Tim and I left Key Biscayne on the first Monday of February, the water was a translucent aqua, more lurid than even my childhood drawings dared to portray. We headed eastward, and after about 12 miles, entered the Gulf Stream. The water underneath us became a deep delicious ultramarine.
In the middle of the Gulf Stream
My friend Jeffrey tells of a trip to Disneyworld in which the Jungle Cruise operator was asked why the attraction’s water was dyed blue. She responded, “to make it look more like water.” The color of the Gulf Stream water we were skipping across was richer and more profound than any water I’d seen before, dyed or not. We were on a slow-motion waterbed of sapphire.
In Vero Beach we’d been equipped with some basic fishing gear by Monica’s pal Rusty Rhymes in order to take advantage of the abundant ocean life that follows the Gulf Stream. But a) we’re more sailors than fishermen, and b) with the (inflatable) dinghy on its davits across the back of the boat, we were stuck between the idea of the three sharp prongs of lure puncturing our precious dinghy, or hanging the line off the side and wrapping it around the propeller. We decided to get used to fishing under calmer circumstances and try sampling the fruits of the Gulf Stream on the way back.
Wearing all the safety gear is much easier when you aren’t also wearing all the cold-weather gear.
Eventually we land ho’ed Bimini in the distance. We aimed for the lighthouse at the south end of Gun Cay and slipped through the cut between it and Cat Cay to its south. Tim had been working on an article about Balance Catamarans for Cruising World magazine and had interviewed the owners of Golden Hour, whose boat he’d sailed in Annapolis when he and his colleagues had chosen the boat as Boat of the Year in its category (link). The Huttons had talked about their time in Cat Cay, and it sounded like a calm place to check in. We radioed the dock, and found a serious gate closed against us. After taking a minute to assess our options, we then did what Kevin Hutton (the boat owner) had recommended: we dropped his name. Neither Tim nor I would usually take someone up on an offer like that, as experience has shown us the drop of the name is not nearly as powerful as a dropper thinks it is. This case was different. There was a slight pause on the other end of the radio transmission, and quite soon we were warmly welcomed in.
We tied up to the dock, and the water was so absolutely clear we could see the details of the bottom of our hull. We could see pinstripes on little tiny fish swimming around us. The boat seemed like it was suspended in air. The next chunk of time we were also suspended, in that we hadn’t been entirely clear on the Immigration and Customs requirements. We’d taken Covid PCR tests within 72 hours of arrival, but hadn’t completed the online paperwork in Miami, as we’d thought it was optional to do it ahead of time. Here we were in a technical loop in the Bahamas where our Bahamas SIM-carded phone couldn’t click in without wifi, but without wifi we couldn’t click in. There were a very long couple of hours where we were contemplating the idea that we might be turning around and sailing right back to Florida. The sun starting to sink on the horizon, a cluster of very patient and helpful Bahamians stuck with us as we sorted it all out. The moral of the story is even if you think you’re done with your homework, do your damn homework. Also, kindness pays.
As it turned out, Kevin and his wife Sandy arrived the next day. He showed us around the island where he has done some great work. Cat Cay is privately owned and is kind of a country club/gated community. Kevin and Sandy call it Fantasy Island, which is pretty apropos, even to the detail of petite planes landing on the teeny tiny landing strip. Kevin’s career is in emergency medicine, and over time he’s crafted a clinic where he has organized a roster of sort of time-share doctors. The physicians come to the island for two weeks a year, they have a place to stay in the idyllic surroundings, and they treat whatever comes up for the island’s residents, be they club members or locals. Kevin’s been doing this for more than two decades, installing defibrillator machines around the island and the like. During our tour, as we golf-carted around, we’d pass Bahamian landscapers and house painters who would high-five Kevin as we passed, with a cheerful “What’s up, doc?” One of the visiting doctors we met at the tail end of his two-week shift was caring for a Bahamian who had gotten battery acid in his eyes.
From Cat Cay we pushed off to cross the 65 miles or so of the Great Bahama Bank. It was a full day of sailing with no view of land, but where the water was never deeper than about 20 feet. You could see every detail of what was on the bottom. The colors of the water went from turquoise to robin’s egg to Tiffany blue, hues that swimming-pool designers dream of. The sky overhead morphed from powder blue to chambray to a rich periwinkle. The sun was hot, the day sort of ethereal and other-worldly. We anchored off Chub Cay that night, and the next day headed across the Northwest Providence Channel toward Nassau. Whereas the day before we never went deeper than 30 feet, crossing the channel we were in water more than 10,000 feet deep. It was breathtaking to imagine that volume of water (and whatever might be lurking in it)!
Tim surveys the blue horizon
The next day we were ready to encounter some human beings. We took a quick hop from our night’s anchorage at Rose Island over to Palm Cay Marina on the southeast corner of New Providence Island, where Nassau is. They told us what slip to go to, as if that were a simple thing. Imagine you’re at Trader Joe’s on a Saturday, and in order to go do your shopping you have to navigate your VW bus into a slender parking spot between a bunch of shiny new Mercedes SUVs. But also imagine the pavement moves and you have no brakes. It was a little stressful. But we did it, no damage to anything except our nerves, and we gave the miniature pinscher on the next boat a whole mouthful to bark about.
When you spend the money to tie up in a marina, there can be perks: showers and laundry can make us starry-eyed, but some places also offer a courtesy car. You can borrow their car for a couple of hours to go get groceries or what have you. We’ve found that every courtesy car has its quirks. Since the Palm Cay Nissan’s displayed only Japanese, we couldn’t figure out how to change the music, so we listened to a series of Bahamian covers of about five American oldies on repeat. We drove into town, (remembering to stay on the LEFT side of the road), and found our way to Potter’s Cay, a funky little strip of colorful bars and rickety conch sellers sort of stacked under the bridge to Atlantis. We toodled around town just barely getting our eyes on things, like seeing every possible color of bougainvillea, and getting stuck in Nassau traffic before we had to return the car. We got the car back (late!), put a load of laundry in, and settled down at the beachside bar watching the sherbet-colored sunset over the cerulean waters and drinking something that contrasted with all of the blue.
