Big news – we caught our first conch! And it’s a monster! Even with instructions, it took some time to figure out the right place to cut to free the animal from its shell – but once we did, conch salad and conch fried rice were on the menu!
Hopetown Hopetown Hopetown. It seemed like once we were south of Whale Channel, all the action on the radio was about Hopetown on Elbow Cay, so we headed there to check it out. We debated taking a mooring ball in the harbour – we’d never used a mooring before – but ultimately decided it was silly to pay to be not attached to land when we could just anchor outside of town. And boy, were we glad we had anchored out – Hopetown is well protected, which means no wind, and it was roasting in town while we had a great breeze anchored out by the lighthouse.
We spent about 3 days in town. If you like to poke around in shops, Hopetown is probably the best place in the Abacos to do it. We went to the beach twice to escape the heat. The reef was very close to the beach, within easy swimming distance, though you had to swim out farther to get past the murky, sandy water where the waves crashed. Though we saw some big brain coral, a huge snapper, Nassau grouper, and stingray, the reef was a bit disappointing after seeing how beautiful the one at Fowl Cay was.
We hung out at Cap’n’Jacks for tacos and 2-for-1 margaritas. We met a couple our age who flew down to escape the Canadian cold, a guy from SC who is spending months here on a mooring ball, and a couple that comes here every year for weeks to months and just bounces from vacation home to vacation home if they can’t find one available for their whole stay.
We toured the Elbow Reef Lighthouse, the only manned, kerosene-lit lighthouse left the world. It was pretty neat and it’s not government funded, so we bought some postcards in gift shop – which are so outdated that they claimed the Bahamas still had 3 manned lighthouses!
While we were in the lighthouse, we saw the dark rain clouds coming. We joked about going back to the boat to shower and wash the boat in the rain, but figured it would only last 10 minutes. But no, it rained and POURED for hours. We left the lighthouse and hung out on a covered dock for a while. Then ran through the rain to the public restrooms (several towns have public restroom buildings, one of the pleasant surprises here, haha) and then to a bar, where the Bahamian military personnel were also waiting out the rain (but only drinking Coke).
After the rain finally stopped, we went to Wine Down Sip Sip, which, in addition to having 2-for-1 drinks, also had probably the best restaurant food we had in our whole trip — PIZZA. Now this was fancy pizza, which normally is never as good as normal New York pizza, but somehow this flatbread with pepperoni, sundried tomatoes, and artichoke was one of the best pizzas we’d ever had. So good we almost ordered a second one that day, even though it was $20 and not that big. So good that we haven’t stopped talking about how good it was and I might be drooling just thinking about it.
We were in need of a major provisioning run, so we next sailed across to Marsh Harbour, where we’d previously road tripped with Dave. Over the course of few days, we got Paul a haircut (in an hallway with no business signs where a kid helped by yelling “Dad! Customer!”), bought at least 3 weeks worth of groceries, finally did laundry at the 4th place we tried, dinghied around to many bars only to realize this place just isn’t that lively on a Saturday night (making me really miss my friends), and had a good meal at Mangoes where I realized I had never been so happy to eat fish that was grilled instead of fried!
While doing laundry, we met a couple who asked us, “How are you doing this at your age?” and then they explained they were asking because when they started cruising 25 years ago, this was the question that people asked them. They said at that time, the wife took a sabbatical from work, the husband sold his business, and they sailed off to Venezuela with their 11-year-old son. Their son would take the bus by himself to the next town over to buy ice cream – they told him he was allowed to do this as long as he came back knowing one new word in Spanish – and he eventually learned to speak Spanish fluently. They said now though that they feel no need to go further than the Abacos! They aren’t the only people who have sailed all over yet told us the Bahamas are all they need!
There was a boat in the harbour that I recognized from a Facebook blog Enterprise Sailing that I had been following because the guy’s journey down the ICW was around the same time as ours. We spun around the boat in our dinghy like total creepers, until a shirtless, 20-something guy poked his head out. I yelled, “Hi! Not to be creepy, but I follow you on Facebook!” He seemed to be not weirded out by this, and we chatted for a bit; his name is also Paul. His girlfriend was flying in soon and we said hopefully we’d catch them later.
Our last night in Marsh I watched needlefish and shrimp swim around our boat as it got dark.
When I had told coworkers I was sailing to the Bahamas, multiple people asked me, “Are you going to go to Pig Island?!” The original “pig island” is Staniel Cay – no where near us – but the Abacos has a copy cat attraction at No Name Cay. That was our next destination.
No Name is north of Whale Channel, so we once again waited for calm weather to cross it – and this time we were prepared to fish it. On our first few tries, as soon as Paul dropped the lure in the water, a snapper would hit – we got one big enough to keep for dinner. We also put out larger lures on the hand lines – I thought something hit and when I pulled it in, the lure was missing an eye and had some fresh teeth marks in it. We were happy to finally have some fishing luck!
At No Name Cay, we grabbed our cameras and headed for the beach. A couple tour boats were already stopped there, and the pigs had run towards them to check what was for lunch. “Piggies!” I squealed as we beached the dinghy – I mean, really, how else are you supposed to react? Big mamas, tiny piglets, and everything in between swarmed us to find out what snacks we had brought them. It turns out they don’t care about onions and peppers, but they were quite thrilled about the cantaloupe. Though they would wade into the water for food, they had no interest in doing any actual swimming.
Some local restaurants donate their scraps to the pigs. We also watched a guy who was driving back and forth from Green Turtle to haul water to the pigs. I asked him how often he has to do that – he said every 2 months but that left me wondering if that means someone else is coming in between his runs. Why are pigs on a beach so exciting? I have no idea – it’s just fun, I guess!
The walk to the ocean side of No Name was nice at low tide; I wish the ocean hadn’t been so rough so we could have checked out the nearby reef. We really enjoyed snorkeling in the mangroves here too – it was just a nice change of pace for underwater scenery, and we saw huge schools of tiny, shiny fish, a bunch of snappers, some big stingrays, and lots of juvenile conch. And of course we saw a big barracuda. One of the guide books suggested getting out of the water if you see a barracuda. If we followed that rule, we’d never get to swim!
We liked No Name so much we stayed for several days and had the place to ourselves for most of it. The weather forecast called for storms with 40 knot winds on Monday, so we wanted to get into a marina at Green Turtle Cay a few days in advance of that. Our last day in No Name, a boat came up to us to say hello – it was Other Paul and his girlfriend Jamie. They were heading to Green Turtle – we said we’d see them there!
