Neighborhood

Each morning at 9:00, Sherri comes on the VHF radio, and begins the day Pledge-of-Allegiance-style, with a recitation of the Exumas Land and Sea Park rules: no fishing, no conching, no lobstering. The people on the boats nearby later chime in, who’s coming, who’s leaving. It feels like the climax of a summer camp pow-wow: there are thank yous, and safe travels, and “Sherri, I have a papaya for you”, “I have some cookie batter”. It’s a very sweet community conversation.

The Land and Sea Park stretches over 22 miles and  16 major cays in the Exuma chain. The cays—pronounced KEYS— are not much more than above-ground coral reefs, with scrub palmettos and other ground cover scrappily clinging to pockets of dirt in the rock. The only native mammal is the threatened hutia, which turns out to be a diminutive groundhog-like creature. Sometimes you see a lizard of one kind or another skittering over the rocks. One visitor told us he’d come across a boa constrictor, so we did a little stomping when we went through undergrowth.

The edges of each body of land are intermittent powder-white-sand beaches upon which visitors have stacked small cairns of the porous rock chunks that make up the remainder of the shore. The landscape feels a little lunar, an ideal site for filming an old Star Trek episode. The main beach by the ranger station has a sperm whale skeleton assembled for perusal and warning (the whale died after ingesting plastic trash, apparently), as well as lounge chairs for use. The park offers moorings for a small fee and was a spectacular and protected place to safely wait out a few days of strong northeasterly winds. From the ranger station you can climb to the top of Boo Boo Hill, where there is an accumulation of offerings to Neptune, painted driftwood, rocks, shells and coconuts assembled over the years. We looked down on the orderly moored boats below as we stretched our arms for cell phone service from the tower located a few cays away.

The tower in question is over in Staniel Cay, a hub of activity after the pristine and peaceful surroundings of Warderick Wells. We anchored in Big Major’s Spot, known for its swimming pigs, who reside on one particular beach and are photographed daily by boatloads of visitors. We made our way over with some tired lettuce, which the pigs were happy to chomp down, but apparently, they’ve become aggressive with so much attention, and we kept a little distance. Staniel Cay Yacht Club is a hub of activity for people who come by boat and anchor, or by plane and stay at the cottages on the cay. I heard there are 70 Bahamian residents of Staniel Cay itself, and Tim counted 56 boats anchored at Big Majors one day when we were there. It feels a little out of balance, but I never felt any irritation or resentment from the locals. Their economy is tourist-based. We did laundry and bought some groceries that arrived on the mailboat from Nassau; we ate some conch and grouper and drank at the yacht club bar.

We met a couple on the Xquisite catamaran, Shell Shocked, because Tim knew the boat from Boat of the Year, and wanted to know if the owners liked the boat as much as he had when judging it for the competition. Shelley and David love their boat and had jumped into it with both feet during the pandemic. They’d never really sailed before—in the past they’d chartered boats that came with a captain, and enjoyed it enough to believe they wanted more. And they seemed to. Their catamaran was about as wide as Billy is long, with all the conveniences of a nicely appointed suburban house. At the anchorages here we are often surrounded by catamarans, favored by the charter companies for their shallow draft and their capacity for housing more passengers. Shell Shocked is a fine specimen, elegant and well-maintained. David and Shelley are thriving in their new life; they found community on the water that they didn’t quite know they were missing at their actual suburban house in Alberta, Canada. We were impressed by their abundance of floating real estate. Aside from all of the showers, refrigeration, and the impressive watermaker, my favorite detail was that the stairs down to the cabins pulled out like drawers. Oh, and the dedicated tool bureau with molded foam places in which to nestle each individual wrench and screwdriver. A far cry from Billy’s plastic bin “system.” The thoroughbred catamaran is maybe a second cousin to our little floating home. 

Mural from Lorraine’s Cafe, Black Point Settlement

Neither Tim nor I would ever call ourselves churchgoers by any stretch, but on Sunday we decided to go to church. The cross behind the altar was punctuated by lightbulbs like a dressing-room mirror. Behind the cross the walls were festooned with swaths of fabric in three shades of purple. The first person to speak was a woman in red wearing a large white hat festooned with flowers. Soon a one-armed man in a brown plaid shirt took the mic to say, “I don’t know about you, but I’m in love with Jesus Christ.” There followed about an hour of solid praise, spoken and sung, accompanied by an organist in the corner, a woman playing a full drum kit, and multiple tambourines. And just when we thought all of the possible members of the congregation had participated in the service, the organist, who up to this point had been demurely accompanying the goings on from his perch in the corner, stepped up to the microphone and spoke with full throated passion for a good half an hour. He said, among other things, “Let God in! Let Him spear the grouper! Let Him catch the Crayfish!” When we left, Tim shook the hand of the woman in the white hat and thanked her for being so welcoming. She quickly brought him in for a big warm embrace.

Yes, as advertised, the pigs really do swim.

We decided to move along from the Staniel scene and sailed four miles away to Black Point. We hadn’t been there long when a familiar navy-blue boat adorned with giant daisies pulled in. We had seen Lotte in Nassau and again in Staniel where we’d complimented her appearance. As we dinghied back from our initial look around Black Point, we greeted the crew and were invited over for drinks later in the day. Aboard we found a father, Mark, with his two daughters in their 20s, Janne and Greta. Janne turned out to be the captain, and the three of them had sailed over from Germany on Lotte, a 35-foot Fantasia. They’re taking a year off from Covid and their regular lives to have this adventure together. Their accommodations are abundantly sweet, charming, and cozy. They have lots of steel baskets dangling from the ceiling containing fruits and vegetables. They had rigged with macramé part of a plastic bottle filled with sand and water to accommodate a piece of mangrove they’d found floating. Every surface had something strapped to it, a candleholder here, a bottle of something there.  It felt very personal and human, and yet did not lack competence. They spoke of their experience going from Spain to the Canary Islands to Cape Verde to Barbados and eventually to the Bahamas.

We returned to Billy delighted by the encounter. Our cabin seemed as vast after Lotte as it had seemed spare after Shell Shocked. Spending another couple of days at Black Point, we enjoyed walking around, seeing the schoolchildren in their green uniforms run around playing games with a stray mooring ball, the fishermen cleaning their (or God’s) catch of grouper and lobster and throwing the scraps to the waiting sharks, the force of the water on the Exuma Sound side of the island geyser through a blow hole in the ground. We went to Scorpio bar for happy-hour and spoke with a couple from the boat Tilt who were spending their 16th season on their 5th boat in the Bahamas. They knew the bartender by name, they had been to all the nearby spots many times over, and they welcomed us to their community.

We didn’t keep this conch, but Tim picked it up all by himself.