Challenges: Epilog
Tim with Dr. Downes, our hero.
After eight days, Tim got out of the hospital on a Tuesday. We spent a few days in a hotel on Junkanoo Beach for him to adjust to life on the outside. It was a different Bahamas experience: Spring Break and cruise ships.
By Friday we reunited with Billy P, and Tim’s dear cousin Danny joined us. We had a short weather window to get out of Nassau and up to Grand Bahama to hunker down while another blustery front blew through, and the plan was to then head to Florida if we could. We left in the early morning on Saturday and headed north.
Our sail up to Grand Bahama was relatively uneventful. Danny took the helm so Tim could elevate his injured leg. This water we were in was dramatically different from what we’d gotten used to on the Banks, where the depths are measured in single-digit meters. Billy draws about 1.8 meters, and in the Exumas we had to always be aware of depths so as not to run aground. With water that shallow and that clear, you could see every coral head or starfish you passed over, which is beautiful but can also be disconcerting. (Is that lump of coral going to puncture the hull, or does it just look that way?) Heading north from Nassau, on the other hand, the Providence Channel can be as deep as 30,000 feet! The water is still ridiculously blue and clear, but the bottom is too remote to see, and no worries about hitting it. This does, however, mean the waters are fair game for cruise ships. And they are there in abundance.
Danny and the hermit
We stopped for the night in the Berry Islands. We could see four giant cruise ships lurking on the other side of Great and Little Stirrup Cays, the two cruise-line owned islands, tarted up with ziplines and wave machines and all the other things that cruise passengers enjoy when they get off the big boats. We anchored, and Danny and I snorkeled around the boat, and I found him a conch shell with a resident crab, but there wasn’t much else to see. You could watch Danny start to slowly unwind from his life’s hecticness.
Front in front of us
We pulled up the anchor at dawn the next day and headed north toward Grand Bahama. It was a bit of a race against the front heading toward us—we didn’t want the wind to change until we’d arrived. We got a little bit of rain in the face but arrived at the inlet to Lucaya and docked the boat before anything dramatic started blowing.
In 2019 Hurricane Dorian hit Grand Bahama and the Abacos as a Category 5 storm, and then it parked for more than 48 hours. Storm surges surpassed 20 feet just about everywhere on the island, people told us. And you could surely still see the damage, with tattered boats and docks in different stages of disrepair around us. Port Lucaya had shown promise as the next great cruise ship destination, but Dorian put a lot of plans on hold, if it didn’t sink them entirely. We took our marina’s shuttle boat over to Port Lucaya to find some fun, or at least some food. We were dropped off at a dock and headed out to look for some action. Tim was still not perfectly ambulatory, so Danny went ahead to survey the scene. He came back and said there was repellant music blasting in an empty square, and it felt like a dead end. So we turned around and went to a little swanky place at the local hotel. We had an overpriced dish off the menu that we expected to be popcorn shrimp, but instead it was shrimp with popcorn scattered around on the plate. We were underwhelmed by the experience.
Tim and Danny with the obligatory Kalik beer and tubs of conch salad. Yum.
Tim had heard of a place called Rumrunners, and we figured there had to be more for us in the area than overpriced shrimpy popcorn. So, we headed back, past some boarded-up restaurants and some decrepit docks to the empty square with the loud music. It was weird, like a party without a guest list. Beyond it were a whole bunch of artificial Bahamian shacks, brightly painted and mashed together cheek-by-jowl, looking like a low-rent Disney village. We found Rumrunners, where Tim and Danny quickly bellied up to the bar. I walked around surveying the neighborhood. There were bars and restaurants and outlet stores, strangely. A Greek restaurant advertised phone cards and Cuban cigars. We'd landed in a peculiar place built as a tourist trap for the cruise ships that never came. Like that vacuum that Nature abhors, the Bahamians repurposed the tourist trap into a town square.
Toasting my dear departed Uncle Bill on his birthday.
Over the next few days we grew quite fond of Port Lucaya. We celebrated Danny’s birthday, fleeing one watering hole when the bartender, hearing of the occasion, solemnly vowed “I’m going to Fuck.You.Up.” He meant it, too, and was delivering trios of shots to the table at a pace guaranteed to inundate us in a hurry. We were charmed by Bahamian Karaoke of Wagon Wheel. We indulged in Daddy Brown’s conch salad, prepared fresh for us in his little closet size conch salad hut. The place was built as an artificial Bahamian village, but like the conch shell with the hermit crab resident: it had become an actual Bahamian village of sorts.
We watched the weather. We rented a car and checked out West End. Danny had tickets back to Maryland on a Thursday, and it looked like that same Thursday might possibly have the wind headed in a good direction for us to sail back to Florida across the Gulf Stream. On Wednesday we headed Billy back out the channel and around the elbow of Grand Bahama that is Freeport and docked at West End. We had a last snorkel and some final Bahamian delicacies: conch fritters and piña coladas. We woke early and bid “so long” both to our Danny and to the Bahamas. There was a great deal of wind, even if it was in the right direction. We rocked and rolled across the Florida Straights with big waves occasionally crashing into and filling the cockpit. Over the surf, Tim could hear Dr. Ross Downes in his ear: “Whatever you do, don’t get your leg wet.” The leg stayed pretty dry, thanks to Tim’s fancy sailing pants, and we made it to Fort Pierce inlet before sunset. Exhaled. Then we made our way up the Indian River and through the winding channels to Monica and Charlie’s house by nightfall. They were there to meet us on the dock with flashlights.
Timbeaux happy to be back on the water
