Blackpoint-Little Farmer's Cay

I know it’s been awhile since our last posting, but as we get farther down the Exuma chain, things we take for granted on land such as internet access (and ATM’s!) become less available. That being said, we have been able to keep in close contact with parents and children because we bought a Bahamian SIM card and have purchased (a small fortune’s worth) of pre-paid cards along the way. Every Cay we’ve visited, and some we didn’t, seem to have a Batelco tower (Bahamian cell service) on them. Other cruisers are utilizing a program called Skype when they have good internet access. With a microphone and speakers (or a headset in public places), they call land and mobile lines for pennies per minute. We will be looking into that shortly, but as noted, it’s only of use when good internet access is available.

We left Stanley Cay (and the swimming pigs) on March 14^th and had a great sail day to Blackpoint, arriving in the late afternoon. While the land is not high, the beach was in a natural harbor with a clean sand bottom. As we are getting more comfortable with the boat and the shallow waters of the Bahamas, we decided to sail in past the other 30 boats in the harbor and dropped the anchor just off the beach. We could have walked to shore! Instead, we took the dinghy and Nyla into shore to walk around. It had been our intention to stay for a few days, do laundry, boat chores and sample the local cuisine. However, we soon discovered the Blackpoint merchants accept only cash. In as much as we had not seen an ATM since Nassau and spent the last of our cash on Stanley Cay, we quickly decided Blackpoint would be only an overnighter and hoped to have better luck on Little Farmer’s Cay, our next stop before Georgetown. The next morning, Morgan was apparently recalling his days as a live-aboard sailor on boats without engines (he sailed in and out of his slip in California). If the closest boat had been just a little farther away, he would have been able to successfully weigh anchor with just sails and no engines. However, due to the proximity of the next boat, we did use the engines to motor up to the anchor, but turned around and left the harbor under sails alone. This was my first experience with that and I was duly impressed!

We had another great sail day and actually anchored under sail alone very close to shore at Little Farmer’s Cay. It's quite an experience to be headed straight into the shore doing 7 knots with no engines to turn off and come to a stop! (For our non-boating readers, 7 knots is extremely fast for us; we generally do 4-5 knots under engine power alone, so 7 under sail is really good!) Morgan handled it without a hitch and then radioed the yacht club and discovered they took plastic, so we were happy cruisers! (By the way, it has occurred to us that the term “yacht club” may conjure an inaccurate image in the mind. 95% of the “yacht clubs” down island are little more than a small bar, sometimes with food and beverage sales and many have side walls that are able to be “open air.” Patrons are not wearing yachting hats and docksiders. Most have ball caps or windblown hair and are wearing shorts and Crocs or are barefoot.)

Little Farmer's Cay is only 1 1/4 miles long and not even a mile wide and full time residents number far less than 100. The first night after anchoring (on the beach next to the very short airstrip), we visited the Little Farmer's Yacht Club where we met the owner, Roosevelt Nixon and Mrs. Nixon. They are life long residents of the Cay and are preparing to renew the vows for their 50th anniversary at the same church in Nassau where they were married. That night we had lobsters for dinner that were probably swimming that morning. To die for!

The next day I did chores on the boat while Morgan went in to do the laundry so that we would both have the afternoon free to walk around and see the sights. Mr. and Mrs. Nixon were quite surprised to see Morgan (instead of me) doing the laundry. Miss Shirley, a long time employee, told Morgan he was "a good boy!" He assured me his manhood was not threatened!

Later in the afternoon, we tried to go to the post office to purchase stamps and mail some letters. Though it was early in the afternoon, the post office was closed. As we were walking away, Little Jeff (THE contact for fresh fish and lobster) came out of his house next to the post office and said it was closed but might be open tomorrow. Turns out the post mistress is his wife and was right inside! We asked about stamps, but both the post mistress and the post office were out. So, we walked a little further to a restaurant we had read about, Ocean Cabin. We met Terry Bain, the owner, and spent the better part of an hour with him. Morgan and Terry discussed everything from Alaska, to the military, to the fact that Terry is, in his own words, an "anti-monarch." Terry and his family have been on the Cay for generations and is interested in absolutely everything. He is extremely informed on a variety of subjects and writes an editorial for The Exuma Breeze, a weekly newspaper. Ironically, Morgan (while doing laundry like a "good boy" according to Miss Shirley) had just read Terry's latest editorial, which had made quite an impression on him. The subject had to do with fact that wealthy land purchasers who have purchased land within the Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park are allowed to develop as they see fit, yet the Bahamians and cruisers are outright banned from certain areas and are not permitted to fish or remove anything from the park. (I believe I may have covered that part in our Shroud Cay blog.) He actively promotes STEP - Save The Exuma Park (from development on land and sea.) We could have talked with Terry for hours; he was definitely one of the most interesting people we've met during our travels. He gave us some fliers with information on the Exumas and Little Farmer's. While it would take a separate posting to do it justice, one interesting item was that Little Farmer's was settled by freed slaves from Exuma. (This next passage is verbatim from Terry's Second Edition of "The Flag of Farmer's Cay.) "One woman named Chrisanna with her young childred - James Michael Nixon and Adam and Eve Brown. They boaght all of the Cay and willed it to their descendants; to be undivided as tenants in common. Today approximately seventy permanent residents are their descendants - although most descendants are not living on Farmers Cay." After reading that, we are assuming that Roosevelt Nixon is also one of her descendants. Fascinating man, Terry Bain.

The next day we needed to go to shore to burn some personal papers that we never got around to shredding. We decided to make a pit in the lee of a rusting shipwreck on a neighboring Cay. While approaching the beach, we thought we saw Robinson Crusoe hailing us. Turns out he was working crew on a monohull anchored north, he walked 2 hours to try to get to Little Farmers and was basically trying to hitchhike a dinghy ride to avoid swimming across the channel in a strong current. We never pick up hitchhikers in the States, but down here it just seemed like another day in the Bahamas! After having a few beers together while we finished our task, we gave Bretton a ride back to his boat. They were also headed to Georgetown, and wished each other fair winds.

The next day we decided to go "outside" to the Exuma Sound hoping we could sail a full day and arrive in Georgetown by dark. The wind was blowing 20 knots, which would have been terrific if it were coming from the north. However, as per the norm, it was coming from the southeast. I think we tacked more miles than we made forward progress. After a long day of pounding into the seas and waiting to see which of the four of us would lose our stomach first, we cut in near Rat Cay and made our way to the tip of Great Exuma, Barretare. There we anchored in quite shallow water off Little Hog Cay (don't you love some of these names?) and relaxed for the evening. We got an early start the next morning and finally arrived in Georgetown in the afternoon on the 19th, which will require a separate blog . . . .