Buddy Boating to Spanish Wells

On Monday, March 24, we left Little Harbour for Royal Island, a good, safe (no dragging!) anchorage that will serve as kind of a pit-stop for us on the way to Nassau. We 'buddy-boated' with a very nice couple we met in Little Harbour from Vancouver on a sailboat named Our Little Chicadee. When you 'buddy-boat', it is just traveling in sight of another boat or two who are all going to the same place. You keep an eye out for each other, talk by radio a few times, commiserate about the weather, etc. It is a nice, safe way to travel. We had thoroughly checked out the weather report and it looked beautiful. It was supposed to be 10-15 knots out of the north (perfect to drive us southeast) all day with higher winds coming that evening (after we supposedly were safe in our little anchorage). Tuesday's forecast called for high winds and squalls. Well, of course, the higher winds and squalls decided to make their appearance by late morning, Monday. We had 28 knots, all the sails were up, and our caprail was in the water! Trying to bring in sail in those kinds of winds is not easy, and lines got all tangled up, but it got done. At some point, Al and Gail on Chicadee thought they might turn around and go back, but when we said we were going on, they persevered, and we both made it to Royal Island just at sunset.

The next morning, John noted that the two couples on the German-flagged boat next to us went 'skinny-dipping'. Later on, we talked to the two men who had been anchored on the other side of the German boat who discovered when they dove down to scrape the bottom of their boat (a perennial must-do), a 'nest' of jellyfish. There was about a 10 foot depression in the sand about 15 feet down FILLED with jellyfish. Makes me shudder just to think about it!

From Royal Island we made a short hop to a town called Spanish Wells. High winds were predicted so we splurged and got a slip in a marina and met up again with Chicadee and the two men with the jellyfish story, Mike and Bill, from New York. Spanish Wells, we felt, was the nicest town yet. It had two grocery stores, a dive shop, two restaurants (one with ice cream!), a pay phone, and a couple of marine stores. They also had a woman who had a shell shop in her garage and sold conch (properly pronounced 'konk') horns, a must-have for the Bahamas. Every night at sunset, people salute the setting sun from the deck of their boats by blowing on conch horns. Well, we bought one which was kinda different from the rest, and while admiring it at lunch, John starts to tell me the story about how the ancient Bahamians began blowing the conch shells at sunset in order to create a vibration to make the fish come to the surface so they would be easy to catch. Okay, l'm buying that. Then, he said, our shell was not that kind of shell. It was designed to attract women. It was a "conk-u-bine" shell...Well, you'd think after all these years (we've been married 39 years this June) that I wouldn't fall for these things.