The Exuma Island Cays
On January 13th of this year, we landed in George Town in the Bahamas to spend two weeks exploring the Exuma Island Cays on a 42-foot catamaran. Ari's parents—aspiring sailors who eventually wish to circumnavigate around the world—invited us on this trip to learn from our airbnb hosts/captains, Alex and Jeff, what sailing life is like in the Caribbean.
Our journey took us north of Georgetown along the inside (west side) of the Exuma Island Cays. Before we could explore the inside, though, we had to sail on open ocean temporarily to reach Rudder Cut. I think that short stint on the open ocean was enough to confirm the premonition I had of sailing's drawbacks. Ari, Ari's mother Melanie, and I were reduced to greenish, immobile lumps while the ocean churned erratically beneath us. Every time I thought I could predict its next move, the boat bucked in a direction I didn't know existed. The three of us laid facedown on the deck or snoozing on the sofa for 95% of those miserable 5 hours. yay sailing!
It wasn't all bad. Every night, we anchored in a new cove and often witnessed various sea creatures greet us upon arrival. Ari stood on the deck of the catamaran one evening, strapping the paddleboards down, when a bottlenose dolphin breached the still waters of the bay. This was not the only remarkable sighting. A few nights later a swordfish burst up and skipped along the surface behind our boat. Just before, a puffer fish the size of a basketball had inspected our anchor before unsteadily swirling away.
The most elusive sea creatures we encountered were always the sting rays. We saw them both from the boat and while in the water, and for some reason I would always have a horrifying moment where I'd think of Steve Irwin and their venomous stingers. But then their majestic, hovering form would glissade by and I'd remind myself that they are only dangerous if you threaten them. Still, I listened carefully when Alex told us to shuffle our feet while walking in shallow water, so as not to disturb them suddenly.
During our slow sail north, we learned many things. We learned that most of the time, "sailing" means motoring forward on our catamaran without the sails up. The weather in the Bahamas is predictably balmy, but it carries winds that were either too weak (<5 kn) or too strong (>15/20 kn) for our grandiose boat to handle well. We sailed, without a motor, a total of three times over two weeks. I marveled each time at the muted sound of the propellers whirring underwater while the sails snapped overhead.
Boats also break, a lot. Sumaya Sol's anchor windlass gave out one morning as we tried to de-anchor. We ended up hauling it up by hand, strapping it haphazardly to its stand, then motored over to Staniel Cay marina to find a mechanic. What seemed like a simple electrical fix ended up taking two mechanics, the entirety of that day, and half of the next. The electrical panel that controls the anchor's windlass was completely corroded. Corrosion is almost always the culprit when something on the boat breaks, we learned from Alex and Jeff. Sumaya Sol had lived through Hurricane Irma while hauled out of the water on Puerto Rico, which meant that it was no stranger to power-washer strength saltwater blasting its every square inch, but that every fixture—electrical or not—had the potential to corrode. Yikes.
One memento I took from our time in the Bahamas, as I do in many places, is that the attractions that draw people to visit villages and beaches so remote they spend hours or days getting there are oftentimes far less romantic than what photos capture. Take exhibit a, for example. The cute little piggy featured in this photo above is an inhabitant of pig beach, a beach home to dozens of pigs near Staniel Cay. Pig beach is one of their main tourist attractions because the pigs turn a plain beach into an oasis of stunning photo opportunities. Pigs on a pristine white sand beach? Preposterous! Even I couldn't resist the opportunity to snap a photo of a pig in a habitat so opposite of our expectations. The pigs eagerly greeted us at our dinghy because we brought food scraps for them (like every other human there), and their caretakers asked us to feed them in the water, for a reason that soon became clear. As Jonathan and I nervously stepped backward while tossing melon rinds in the face of an obese pig, it at one moment decided that now would be the proper time to drop a fat, steaming turd into the turquoise seawater that lapped at our ankles. The caretakers had asked us to feed them in the water so that they wouldn't soil the beach. We very promptly retreated to our dinghy after that incident. Pig beach wasn't so fun after all. Everyone collectively referred to it as pig sh*t beach for the remainder of our trip.
The northernmost point we visited in the Exuma Islands was the Warderick Wells Land and Sea Park. After seeing a myriad of white sand beaches and ocean water so dazzlingly clear it was almost frightening, I didn’t think we’d be able to be stunned at the natural beauty here anymore. I was so wrong. The mooring balls lined the protected bay in a sweeping canal like a giant, cobalt comma along the shallow sand bar. The visitor’s center perched on a point at the tail end of the canal, every part but the roof seemingly enveloped in poisonwood trees and other vegetation. The water below the visitor’s center glowed an impossible aquamarine. Beside the spit, an immaculate beach—so opposite, so free of poop and mammals unlike sh*t beach— awaited our arrival.
Our boat jerked me out of my drooling reverie when it shuddered to a halt and began twirling in the wrong direction. We had beached ourselves, and we were whirring up a storm underwater as our propellers tore into the pure, perfectly quaffed sand bar. So much for the grand entrance.
We spent two blissful days exploring the area. Our hike on the island took us past ancient blowholes so large they could swallow a horse and across sand flats ringed in millions of mangroves. We hiked up to the highest point—Boo Boo Hill— to gaze out over the bay in one direction and the agitated waves of the open Atlantic in the other. The hilltop is piled with hundreds of driftwood planks emblazoned with the names of boats who wish to appease the gods.
The underwater world at Warderick Wells wasn’t as rich as I imagined, and the current was powerful enough to exhaust even a strong swimmer with flippers, but Ari and I were pleased nonetheless. We witnessed a sea turtle swim beneath us, explored a shipwreck nestled in the deepest part of the canal, and swam beside a resident stingray that materialized within feet of Ari’s thrashing legs as he hovered along the sand bar. That was a close one.
When we left Warderick Wells behind to head south again, I realized that it may be the highlight of our trip. We had visited so many cays, snorkeled more during this trip than I have in my entire life, and even explored Thunderball grotto(!), the famous set for Sean Connery, aka James Bond’s, plunge in the movie Thunderball. Even when we found the healthiest, most abundant coral reef of our trip on our way back south—near Johnny Depp’s private island, I must mention— I still thought about Warderick Wells with the same type of inflection as the moment we arrived there. Nowhere was more magical. But like Ari always says (in his best Russell-from-Up voice), “Adventure is out there!” and so we had to continue on.
As my intuition predicted, our trip took a turn for the more exciting but less beautiful. We were forced to escape south due to an oncoming wind storm with swells of up to 15 feet, and so we straight-lined it across the open ocean to shelter in Emerald Bay Marina, back on the same island as George Town. Ari and I spent our final four days wandering aimlessly around the marina and the neighboring Sandals Resort. Our discoveries included a sailor cat named Arrow whose tripod-like stance gave away his wariness on land; that a laundry drier filter can house pounds of lint if it’s neglected for long enough (Ari spent the majority of one evening extracting lint with pliers, exclaiming again and again that he couldn’t fathom why the laundry room wasn’t up in flames already); and that wind can be strong enough to rip cleats off of boats. It wasn’t quite the end to the trip we imagined, but it was entertaining nonetheless.
Alex and Jeff waved us goodbye on January 28th as we sped away in an Escalade with mis-matched tires (a common theme here). Waiting in the one room airport that wasn’t large enough to host a single plane-full of passengers, we couldn’t quite imagine how the arctic wind might feel. Two weeks without a sweater will do that to you.
Ta-ta for now!
-Sofia