Fire in the boat!!

Sailing out of the Bahamas.

We can count our time left in days. Very few days. I’ve been almost numb to it. Maybe sleep walking would be an appropriate description. I suppose it is one of those things you would rather just not think about.

We left Guana Cay today. Our goal was Green Turtle Cay, but the sail was nice, and we really don’t have anything to stop us, so we are continuing on to Great Sail Cay… The first Cay we stopped at in the Bahamas, and appropriately it will be the last.

We’re flying along. The wind is perfect, blowing just hard enough to move us along at a good clip. We have been traveling between 4.5 and 6 knots all day. At this moment we are doing 5.2. All the sails up. But the boat is only heeling around 4 degrees making this a very comfortable sail!

Our friends Lee and Trey are in front of us, and I think we are going to catch them soon, but they are only using their jib so it doesn’t really count if we pass them.

The sun was starting to go down, so I lit up some charcoal to grill a steak, and filled up the alcohol wicks to our Origo stove which ran out of fuel a few days ago. I then went outside and set about raising our big mizzen stay sail.

Before I had the sail set up just right LeeAnn asked me if I could come down below, "I'm kind of busy" I told her, "is it important?"

to which she replied "the boat is on fire..."

I dropped what I was doing and went below. The Origo stove was a blazing inferno. I opened up the lid to the stove and saw that one of the wicks had a huge flame that was burning out of control.

I grabbed a pizza pan and placed it over the round wick, thinking it would smother the fire out, which it didn't. But it did reduce the flames enough that I could put out the second wick with a towel and pull it out of the stove to prevent it from lighting up again and adding to the flames.

Then I thought that I might be able to smother the larger flames with a big towel. No luck, the towel instantly caught on fire and now we had two balls of fire burning inside our wooden boat, one of them being in my hand.

I turned and rushed for the hatch to throw the burning towel into the sea accidentally bashing into LeeAnn on the way. For a split second I saw the towel get caught in the belly of our big mizzen staysail I had just raised up, and with great terror I envisioned the whole sail going up in flames.

I quickly reasoned that the fire inside the boat was the bigger priority and I went back inside to figure out how to extinguish it when I noticed LeeAnn sitting on the bed holding a hand to her head. Apparently when I crashed into her the towel smacked her head and singed off a bit of hair, and most of her eyelashes on the right side!

I looked from LeeAnn to the fire burning in my kitchen and thought “Okay, this situation is really starting to get serious. I need to get this fire put out! Maybe water? Or hadn’t I heard somewhere that water will only spread an alcohol fire? Baking soda!” I started searching through our baking supplies: flower, salt, brown sugar, white sugar… Where the f*ck is the baking soda!"

The fire grows, and my thoughts start to blur in my panic, “Where the f**k is the baking soda!?!”

I hear LeeAnn in the background “I think you burnt off my eyelashes!” I chance a glance and see her examining the damage with a small mirror.

I finally find the baking soda and pour it on the fire..."Come on baby! If this doesn’t work we’re on to the fire extinguisher!!”

The flames go down, but not out. I close the hot lid to the stove melting the skin off my fingers, “Yes!” I think, “I can commit crimes and leave no finger prints! I am the invisible man!”

The fire goes out. LeeAnn is still on the bed with the mirror inspecting her eyelashes. She seems okay so I turn my attention to the food we had been cooking to asses the damage: Garlic and herb rice, steamed veggies, everything looks okay. But the steak!! it's still on the grill!

I rushed outside to find it a little over cooked and dry, but still edible. We dish up some sides, and go sit outside to eat. Right on time to watch the sun go down. Just chalk it up to another day in the life of living on a boat!

Hope Town // Guana Cay

Lee teaching LeeAnn how to preform reconstructive surgery on our main sail.The lighthouse at Hope Town.

We only stayed a day or two in Hope Town. Just long enough to climb to the top of the light house. While we were there we met a cool girl named Ashley. She is a little quirky, but very genuine and nice. If you have ever read Harry Potter you can imagine Ashley as Luna Lovegood.

We struck up a relationship right away. She is the ONLY person we have met who is even remotely close to our own age on the whole trip! We made plans to sail to Guana Cay for the pig roast at a bar called “Nippers”.

Nippers is everything you would expect from a cliché 80’s movie with a setting in the Caribbean. A big outside deck bar with about 3 different levels. The tallest level being a big gazebo where the really sleazy guys can go to get a look down the shirts of the girls walking below.

Everything is painted pastel colors. There are two pools on different levels that are connected by a flight waterfall stairs. There are brightly colored umbrellas everywhere that were made out of the same plastic material used to make pom poms for high school cheerleaders. Women walk around in high hipped neon bikinis, again straight out of the 80’s. All the men are shirtless, as well as brainless, but they have big muscles so that must count for something.

LeeAnn is wearing a white skirt, and a bandanna for a shirt, and Ashley is wearing a faded white skirt, and a strapless shirt. They both look incredibly good and I must admit that as we walked into the bar where men out number women by 10 to 1... I felt like a total pimp! I was behind the girls as we came up the boardwalk and I watched all the heads turn. The guys don’t even try to hide it, and I even hear one them yell to a friend and point! I can feel the guys eying me, sizing me up and sending wave after wave of "cave man" competition vibes.

We dance, and have a good time. People try to dance with the girls, but for the most part they just dance with me or each other. This makes me incredibly happy... mostly because I can feel the collective saddness of the cavemen as they buy themselves another beer and pledge to spend even more time in the gym when they get home. I can almost hear their sad little thoughts: "how come little scrawny kid have two girl and I only have none? Me have big muscle! Me have big muscle!"

The party ends, we go to another bar. Dance more. Drink more. Ashley dances with the locals (depressed cavemen buy another beer). LeeAnn dances with me. The party quickly dies, and we all go home. The sun went down incredibly fast, and before I knew it the sky was black. I felt lucky to have made it through the night with out getting into a fist fight with a drunken bafoon on a testoterone high.

We all played guitar the whole night through and had a generally jolly time!

Now that you have read this far, I'm sorry to tell you that the story really had no point.

Eluthera Caves

After hitchhiking for a few miles we made it to the caves:Bats!
The Caves were really cool. Over a 1/4 mile long, we went in one hole, walked a long long way, then came out another hole. It was pretty cool. I've never been in such a large cave. We had a great time.

Trespassing on private islands

We've been told all beaches in the Bahamas are public. I'm not sure if that extends to private islands... but who cares. This place was too beautiful to pass up. I think it should be against the law for people with too much money to buy up incredibly beautiful natural islands and then shut out the rest of the world. Unless I become incredibly rich and buy my own island. If that were the case I would make a go-cart track on the beach that goes all the way around the island. Just like Mario Cart for Super Nintendo. And maybe I would put up a castle too. With a go-cart track on the inside, just like Bowser's Castle. way cool.

Cool Cave! We've been finding a lot of cool caves lately. There was a big one in the Jumentos that you could drive your dinghy right into. Unfortunately we never got a picture of it.

Lee inside the cave:

This picture is kinda self explanitory"She walks along the edge of where the ocean meets the land
Just like shes walking on a wire in the circus"
- Counting CrowsSo it doesn't look like she is walking on a wire in the circus - but this picture makes me think of that line. The song is called "round here" if you want to check it out.

You might have noticed LeeAnn is always in the pictures. I always ask her to take pictures of me, but she says that I'm not allowed to be in pictures unless I have taken a shower that week.




This is Lee. He has a long story and I don't know all of it. What I do know is that he ran away from home when he was 12. He hitch hiked clear across the country multiple times, even making it to Alaska. He ended up making it through college with a degree in photography. From there he back packed to various countries in Central and South America that were having wars and revolutions. I don't know if he went with the intention to become a photo journalist, but that is what he became. In other words, Lee became a War Correspondent.

He has been arrested numerous times (sometimes in America), been beaten by police, shot at, and hit with shrapnel from bombs.

Lee ended up in eastern Europe where he married a concert pianist who he could hardly communicate with, as neither of them spoke the same language. Lee started a photo agency.

Lee's photos have been on the covers and in the pages of Time, Newsweek, Christian Science Monitor, and a bunch of other newspapers that I don't remember.

He is a really cool guy, makes a killer pizza. We've been hanging out with him since Georgetown. He left for Eluthera today, and we were sad to see him go.... Where will we get our coffee fix from now??!!!??

Jumentos!

The Jumentos - Almost completely uninhabited, there is only one little settlement which is located less than 100 miles from Cuba. These islands are considered remote even by Bahamian standards. Few cruisers visit the Jumentos chain, so the spear fishing and lobstering are pretty amazing.

Beach fire with our buddies from Miakoda and Side by Side

Trigger fish for dinner!!

White cliffs on Water Cay:
My monster Nassau Grouper:

To get to the Jumentos, we first had to make it through Hog Cay Cut. The tricky part about that is the cut only carries 0.9 meters (a bit less than 3 feet) at low tide. Our boat needs a little over 5 feet to float. The tides here usually fluctuate about 2.5 feet. So we had ½ a foot of wiggle room, assuming we didn’t find any rocks or mounds of sand that measured over .5 feet.

We arrived at the cut about 20 minutes before high tide. The weather was perfect. Sunny, and hardly any wind. There were hundreds of coral fans and fish in the cut. We also saw a school of about 6 stingrays. I watched the numbers on the depth sounder drop and drop and drop until they finally bottomed out at 5.4 feet. That was as low as it got, and we made it through with no issues. From Hog Cay we had a great sail down to Water Cay. Small waves, just the right amount of wind, warm sun, one of those days that most people would generally consider “perfect.”

Water cay is very long and narrow. Most of the island is made up of shear white cliffs. All very beautiful. We had a few sharks (the Jumentos are also know for the large number of sharks that come to breed in the shallow water) and barracudas swimming around the boats waiting for us to throw in some food.

The next morning we got up early to get the best of the last day of lobster season. We got skunked, only found 1! We settled for fresh fish and one lobster tail that day. As luck would have it, we later found all sorts of monster lobsters at the Cays further south that we traveled to… but it didn’t bother us too much that we couldn’t spear them. Our friends from Side by Side had been in the Jumentos for a while and had gathered up enough lobsters to share.

In general, the Jumentos were amazing. A true paradise. Beautiful untouched reefs, secluded beaches (wink wink), unbelievably clear water, tons of fish to be had for dinner…. I could go on and on. The trouble with all of this is that we found it very very hard to get comfortable. Things were perfect. So perfect that we actually started getting suspicious of our happiness. We were living the beginning of a cliché horror movie. The part where the niave kids show up to the remote island and everything is so perfect and they are so happy… then slowly the dream turns into a nightmare. LeeAnn and I both felt this way, but we told ourselves: “that’s childish and silly, let’s just relax, what could go wrong?”

We spent the next few days traveling south, and enjoying ourselves. We settled into a nice little routine. I would get up in the morning around 8:30 and read for a while. Around 11:00 AM we would go dive some of the most beautiful reefs I have ever seen to hunt for dinner. Come back around 4:00 and clean our catch. Dinner around was 5:00 or 6:00. Everyone would eat together. And that’s how it was pretty much everyday. The girls had their own routine. Swimming an exploring the islands. Combing the beach for shells. That kind of stuff.

Then one night I woke up to the sound of an engine. I assumed it was nothing but I took a look anyway. I went outside just in time to catch sight of a beat up old lobster boat leaving the anchorage. This was clearly a work boat , they didn’t have any running lights burning, but I could still make out a few shapes moving about on it. I assumed they must be fishermen looking for a place to hang out for the night. I went back to bed, and had a vivid nightmare about a freak storm coming out of no where and washing our boat up on the rocks.

I normally don’t have dreams, so I was really shook up. The next morning LeeAnn and I decided to head north. We got a lazy start and only made it about 20 miles up the Jumentos chain before we stopped for the night. There was hardly any wind, and I was really excited for a good nights rest. I was out as soon as my head hit the pillow. I was a asleep for a good few hours before I woke up, again to the sound of an engine. We had our anchor light on, so I wasn’t too worried about being crashed into. I decided I would just go back to sleep and I was well on my way to that goal when I heard the soft thud of an engine engaging and voices whispering.

I was instantly on edge, and really pissed off. I couldn’t believe that someone was getting so close to us. The island isn’t big enough for this dude? He has to anchor by us? I jumped out of bed and was about to rip the hatch open when I noticed that the voices were speaking in Spanish. I looked out the window and saw the same lobster boat from the night before. The three men I could see aboard the boat were all looking towards mine, only about 100 feet off.

Maybe it was because it was dark… and your imagination is always more powerful at night, or maybe it was because of the horror movie cliché that was still floating around in the back of my mind, but suddenly I put a few things together:

1. We were all alone.
2. Bahamians speak English.
3. Cubans speak Spanish
4. Our anchor light could easily double as a homing beacon for anyone who might be looking for a boat at night.

I quickly turned on some lights inside the boat. And our visitors slowly motored away. Maybe it was nothing, but I slept with one eyeopen for the rest of the night.

We got up early the next day and made it to Hog Cay Cut. It was a very good feeling when we made it through the cut. I felt like a kid who had just snuck into his parents bedroom while they were out for the night. Somewhere you know you aren’t supposed to be, but if you are quick enough, and don’t move anything…. You just might get away with it.

An island to ourselves: