The most interesting part of the day today was spent exploring Black Point Settlement on Guana Cay. Officially, 414 souls call this place home. For cruisers, the point of entry is the government dock, which features a fixed wooden dock that requires some effort to scale at low tide.
From there, a colorful signpost directs you to points of interest including several shops, restaurants, the laundromat, the government clinic, church, school and the telephone store, (BTC).
Most of these services are housed in buildings much like homes. The police station is reassuringly tiny.
Numerous children and groups of adults congregated in groups all along the streets, and at any available bench or table. Children ran freely and mostly barefoot in groups of 2 to 10, with almost no squabbling, and no fear of strangers. Two 5-year-old cousins, both claiming to be “Dominic” accompanied us for a while, showing us how fast they could run and later demonstrating use of the free water spigot that cruisers and homeowners alike use. When one Dominic accidentally got squirted in the face, he let Paula wipe his eyes with some tissues.
A huge barbecue of the split-50 gallon drum type was set up on a street corner, and people congregated, talking, joking, and dancing to music that a local club broadcast loudly, doors open. Across the street at Lorraine’s Café, older men drank beer, played dominos, and shooed dancing children off the tables. We stopped at Lorraine’s too, and after asking if they served snacks (“Oh, you want finger food!”) were served delicious fried red snapper fingers with lime in minutes. We washed these down with Diet Coke. A few hundred yards down the road, teenagers played basketball on a concrete court with high quality hoops.
Again, as in other areas of the Bahamas we’ve visited, the amount of unfinished or abandoned construction amazed us. We saw a huge public park, landscaped, with play set and concrete courts laid, now abandoned and weed-strewn, with large rolls of high-quality green fencing just laying down in the grass rusting. We saw the concrete shell of a large house, unfinished, with a Direct TV dish hooked up.
Folks lived in homes with portions complete and brightly painted, and other portions made of weathered plywood. It’s unclear whether factors related to availability of capital, labor, or possibly the effects of storm damage are responsible for the uneven progress on the projects that we saw.
The neighborhood by the government docks gave the impression of being one large extended family. The adults all appeared to be keeping an eye on all the children, everyone spoke to everyone, and people treated the stores almost like the home pantry. A mother walked into an unattended shop with her young daughter, dug in the cooler for a drink for each of them, and then walked out the back door to pay the cashier who was resting at a picnic table with friends. The atmosphere was relaxed and happy.
We also saw some great scenery and wildlife. We walked trails to small hills that gave us a view of the Exuma Sound, the Eastern ocean side of the Cay opposite the Bank side that we sailed on. The ocean appeared to have calmed quite a bit from the 12-foot swells recorded just days ago. The featured picture today looks north on the sound side.
We also saw some good scenery on the bank side today that we didn’t get a good view of when we were here yesterday.
We saw some very fast bluish striped lizards, and lots of butterflies, mostly Gulf Fritillaries and White Peacocks. We saw a sea turtle and multiple large rays cruising the shallows on the Bank side, as well as gars and nurse sharks. Gulls screamed on the beach and fought over shellfish. Some of the roosters we hear each morning, along with their harem of hens, came to investigate us while we rested on a bench. Some homes kept several goats who grazed contentedly next to the family golf cart.
At 6:30pm, we went to Deshamon’s Restaurant, where we had made reservations. We were greeted and seated in an air-conditioned dining room with oil-cloth tables. The trophies from previous island sailing regattas and maps of the Exumas decorated the room, and a large flat screen TV showed US women’s college hoops. Dinner was a green salad (a luxury in a place where almost all produce is imported) and baked spiny lobster in the shell with lime-butter sauce. Side dishes were delicious: mac and cheese casserole, red beans with rice, and coleslaw. Tommy had Dr. Pepper and Paula had Bluebird canned orange juice. It was fun for Paula not to have to cook, and for Tommy not to have to do dishes!
By the time we left, stuffed, it was dark, and the moon, huge and waning gibbous, was rising. The tide had come up about 2 feet, which made getting back into Poltergeist much easier. We had left lights on in C Ghost and turned the anchor light on before we left, but still, it was slightly tricky figuring out which boat was ours in the large moonlit anchorage. It actually was some of the fancy lighting that other sailboats near us had turned on that helped us the most, as we remembered seeing these lights last night. We vowed that on our list of “home improvements” would be some fancy lighting for C Ghost to help us identify her easily in the dark!
One Response
We remember not being able to I.D. our boat when dingying back after dark. I solved the problem by installing detector solar lights. However one night when the dingy was banging on the swim platform I rose up, naked, out of bed to retie the dingy. Yep! SHOWTIME. I did get applause from the anchorage.