We awoke the next morning to a beautiful Bahamian sunrise. Vamp lay peacefully to her anchor off the docks at Green Turtle. At seven in the morning only the slightest of gentle breezes rippled the waters of the harbor. I waited patiently for almost an hour before deciding that Birgit was not going to wake up until much later in the morning unless I did something about it. Scanning the rack of CD’s above the nav station, I inserted a Jimmy Cliff album into the stereo system and hit play. That old classic “You can get it if you really want” did the trick at half volume, and she pushed by me on her way to the WC, mumbling, “Good morning.”. By the time she emerged from the bathroom, the aroma of freshly brewed Jamaican roast had put a smile on her face.
“Hi, sweetie. Did I wake you up?”
She replied, “I’m going to be charitable this morning. Of course you bloody well woke me up, you arse, and you sodding well know it.”
“Birgit, I think you’ve spent way too much time socializing with the Brits and Aussies to be talking like that. Hey, none of the J-24’s will make it here until late afternoon. I thought we could pack a lunch, take the dinghy over to those few shallow coral heads off No Name, and do some snorkeling today. It’s only about fifteen minutes away. We might be able to find some conch in the sea grass to make a salad to go with the dolphin fillets from yesterday. Clark and AJ can have a quiet dinner aboard with us if they like. Tomorrow night is the kickoff party for the races, and every night after that it just gets wilder and wilder.”
“That sounds like a great idea. If you’ll get the tender launched, I’ll fix us a picnic.”
While Birgit got dressed, I took my second cup of coffee with me up into the cockpit and dragged our Zodiac inflatable dinghy out of the locker recessed in the cockpit sole. I first inserted the rigid mahogany floorboards. Then, using the foot pump, I soon had the black vulcanized rubber boat inflated on the deck. Stenciled on either side of the flotation tubes in two inch white letters was T. T. Vamp. I mounted the fifteen horsepower Evinrude outboard motor on its bracket in the stern, and rigged Vamp’s boom vang to the lifting rings. It was then a simple task to lift the dinghy, and swing the boom over the side to lower it into the water.
After loading up our snorkel gear, towels, sunscreen, and the Gott cooler along with a few Red Stripes, the outboard fired up with a single tug on the starter cord. I took the Zodiac in a wide sweeping turn out of the muddied waters of the harbor, and got her up on plane pointing in the direction of No Name Cay. It was a short trip in mostly sheltered waters. We dragged the tender up on the sandy beach just onshore of a few sparse coral heads and spent the next few hours in the eighty degree water, just finning around looking for conch. We spotted only a lone barracuda, a few small fish, and collected three big conchs. The truly spectacular diving sites in the Abacos are all located on the seaward side of the cays, and are dependent on good weather conditions to be safely explored.
I extracted the conch from their shells and cleaned them on an old weathered plank I found on the beach by the water’s edge. Tossing the guts into the ocean attracted hundreds of tiny fish, more than we‘d seen in hours of snorkeling. I put the cleaned conch into a zip lock bag I’d brought along. When we got back to Green Turtle, I’d tenderize the meat and cut it into little cubes to marinate in a bowl with lime juice, peppers, diced onion and tomatoes for an hour or so in the galley icebox.
After we finished our picnic lunch on the big beach towel Birgit had spread out on the sand, we both fell asleep for an hour in the sun. When she awoke, I was lying on my side with my head resting on my hand watching her. “Hey, girl, I’ve got something I want to talk over with you.” I told her about the bricks of marijuana I’d seen in the kitchen in Clark and AJ’s laundry room, and all the money they’d made for bringing it ashore.
Her only comment was, “Jimmy, can we do that without getting caught? I’ve got no desire at all to see what the inside of a women’s prison is like.”
I replied, “I’m almost positive we could do it. Usually when I come back from anywhere in the Bahamas, all I do is call the local Customs office, they thank me for checking in, and that’s all. I know a quiet little old boatyard way up the Miami river where they let customers work on their own boats. The only way we’d ever get busted is if someone turned us in.”
Well, we left the subject unresolved on that sunny afternoon. In the setting sun on our way back to Green Turtle, skimming along in the Zodiac, we were joined by a school of wild dolphins swooping back and forth in front of our bow. I let out a whoop, cut the engine and leapt overboard with my mask in one hand and the painter in the other. “C’mon in Birgit!”, I yelled. The next few minutes were one of those magical times that stay with you the rest of your lives. With our masks in the water, the dolphins would appear out of the blue at incredible speed, sometimes rolling sideways to get a better look at us and passing by us only inches away. When I raised my head out of the water at one point to check on our position, I saw one dolphin racing towards Birgit only to watch it leap over her body at the last moment. Then, as quickly as they had appeared, they vanished.
As I tugged on the long painter to bring the dinghy alongside so we could climb back aboard, she ripped off her mask and exclaimed, “God, that was fantastic.”
“Oh yeah. There’s not a lot of people in the world that can say they’ve been swimming with wild dolphins. That was a first for me too. I wasn’t even thinking about it. I just jumped in the water. I’m glad I thought to grab the painter, or we’d be facing a long swim and a search to find the tender.”
We were back in the anchorage in no time at all. All of the tiny fleet of J24’s that had left Miami with us had arrived except for Clark and AJ’s 3/4 Time. I hung up the sun shower from the main halyard so we could rinse off the salt before kicking back with a cocktail. The sun shower is a marvelous invention for boaters and campers. It’s a simple contraption consisting of a plastic bag, opaque black on one side and clear on the other, with a hose and shower head attached. Fill it with water, set it on the deck in the sun filled with a few gallons of fresh water, and a few hours later you’ve got an instant hot shower. It saves a lot of wear and tear on the boat’s systems and it’s absolutely free.
Birgit used it first, soaping herself down over her bikini, eliciting catcalls and cries of “take it off” from racers on nearby boats. I said, “Hon, you’re going to have your hands full with all these randy young guys.”
She replied, “I can handle them just fine without help. You know that.”
Indeed, I did. Before leaving St. Thomas, we’d spent a night tied up at the fuel dock in the Sub Base marina, taking on water and diesel for the trip north to Miami. Docked behind us was a monster sized seagoing salvage tug from Cyprus. It’s captain, a Greek named Kostas, had invited us over for dinner and a tour of his vessel. That he was far more interested in Birgit than me was plainly obvious. After dinner, he wanted to show Birgit the bridge, and I stayed in the salon below to finish my baklava. Less than two minutes later, I heard a mighty splash outside and lots of cursing in Greek. Birgit had reappeared below, saying, “I think our visit here is over for the evening.”
As we sat enjoying our drinks, we saw 3/4 Time entering the harbor with running lights lit. They tied up to Vamp, and I got them both drinks while Birgit started dinner. “So, guys. How was your day?”, I asked.
“Beautiful sail”, said AJ, “but we had a few problems with our navigation.”
Like many before them, they were not used to navigating in the Bahamas. Aids to navigation like channel markers and buoys are few and often unreliable. Sailing the Bahamas means you identify cays by profile, and perhaps a lone tree on the horizon, in addition to using your compass. They’d gotten lost for a bit along the way. The conch salad was outstanding, and the dolphin filets cooked on the charcoal grill on the stern pulpit delicious. By ten, we’d said goodnight to Clark and AJ and were entwined in each others arms in our bunk below with the nylon wind scoop rigged in the open hatch to keep us cool while we slept. to be continued……
