Year in Review from
the SPACESHIP Earth
December 1997
Dear Friends and Family,
We're sitting at a table in our apartment- - our apartment!!?
Let's start at the beginning. We started 1997 anchored in South Bight, Andros, Bahamas where we stayed through April. Even though the Bights -- North, Middle, South -- flow from the Tongue of the Ocean to the Florida Straits separating Andros into three parts, Andros is referred to as one island. South Bight flows between South Andros and Mangrove Cay. Different from the rest of the Bahamas. Andros is big. It's 120 miles north- south and more than 20 miles east- west. The settlements (tiny villages) are scattered along the east coast, the windward shore. South Andros is 20 miles by 20 miles. Each settlement has a store, some times in a shed, some times in a living room. The local branch of The Bank of the Bahamas is open every Wednesday for two hours and is fifteen miles down South Andros. The bank doesn't take credit cards. Remember that next time you use your ATM -- a different life style. The main grocery store is across from the bank.
We dinghied ashore to Driggs' Hill, the northern most settlement on South Andros, and met Bonny Forbes, the telephone operator. We rented her car to drive to the bank and the grocery store and put gasoline in the tank at a typical South Andros gas station. Ben Flowers imports fifty gallon drums of gasoline from Nassau on the mail boat. He keeps the fuel in a shed and siphons it into five gallon buckets which he then siphons into the car tank. He says he's never got ten a mouthful of gas. The mail boat arrives from Nassau once a week. Everything comes in on the mail boat. If it's not on the boat, it's not available. What goes out on the mail boat? Conch, thousands of conch, and sponges "for the Greeks". What does one do in a place like Andros in the dead of winter? In the day, we swam in 75° water and dried off in 75° air. We could dive off the boat and pick up a conch. We would gather a bunch together in the water under the boat, but they'd hump themselves away by morning. We're supposed to tie them together. For those of you who don't know how a conch moves, it has one pointed foot that it digs into the sand. So he looks like he's going hump, hump along the bottom. At night we counted the stars and tracked the comet, Hale-Bopp, through the constellations. There are no bridges across the bights, so Andros really is several islands.
On one of three side roads, out in the middle of no where, we heard an air conditioner running; it proved to be a wild, honey bee nest. We explored by dinghy, motoring fifteen miles west ward through South Bight to the Florida Straits. Could we bring the big boat through? Theoretically, but we'd have to wait for high tide in a couple places. There's a 15' deep channel for a few miles, then it disappears and we'd have to cross a half mile of shallow water which is 4'-6" in places at high tide; fully loaded Spaceship draws 4'-6". In the long, undisturbed, tropical days and nights, Ed wrote and re wrote Caribbean Kiss, a novel he's been working on for years. Wendy did yoga on the fore deck for an hour every day. Good for the balance.
A fisherman come by needing some gasoline. We gave him a gallon. Later he brought us two lobsters and several fish. We saw an other fisherman cleaning fish and asked him how much. He gave us a nice one with, "Catch you next time." In April, some big flies showed up. The Bahamians named them, doctor flies, because when they bite they draw blood. We'd climb up into the cock pit and there'd be twenty flies in side the bimini. We'd swat every one of them and in a few minutes twenty more would take their place. We couldn't step outside the screens with out getting bit. It was time to leave. As we motored across the Bight, our alternator quit charging the batteries. Good grief! We tied up at Lisbon Creek on the south of Mangrove Cay and discovered the sail boat, Kolahoi, had a spare alternator. What luck. Mike said, send me a check when you get back to the states. Ed installed the alternator and we sailed away.
We sailed down the east coast of South Andros ducking inside the reef to anchor at night. In the lee of the southern most island (a rock awash) we anchored for our last night in Andros. In the morning we snorkeled around this tiny island and let the incoming tide carry us over an outrageously colorful coral garden full of more beautiful and friendly fish than the brochure promised -- and, of course, the resident five foot long barracuda kept a watchful eye on us. Some fishermen told us to sail to the last island, and then sail 220° and we'd go directly across the Bahama Flats (miles of water 20' deep) to Cay Lobos on the Old Bahama Channel. On our chart we saw mile-long sand bores that uncovered at low water, right in the way. But we wanted to see the sand bores any way so 220° we sailed. No sand bores. We looked all day and the next day sailing a zig-zag search pattern. No sand bores. We gave up and sailed over night to Cay Lobos, a tiny deserted islet on the south end of the Bahama Flats with a tall, once elegant but now inoperative, light house. In Andros we had been told to climb the Cay Lobos light house and look across to Cuba. We looked inside and saw a rope ladder going up into dark ness. No thanks.
The next day we sailed into the Old Bahama Channel and headed west for the Cay Sal Banks which lie between Cuba and the Florida Keys. During the night, a US Coast Guard boat hailed us and we answered all their questions satisfactorily. We asked about Cuban refugees on the Cay Sal banks and they said, the freedom boats (some only two inner tubes tied together) have stopped. So without a worry, we sailed NW following the Channel expecting to be pushed along by the ever blowing tradewinds from the east. Not so easy; a west wind drove us back onto the Grand Bahama Flats (ten feet of water). Then a cold front came through with winds north by east and drove us SW toward Cuba. Wanting to go NW, we sailed on a close star board reach with 20 knots of wind blowing across the north flowing current. We were lifted and rolled on six foot seas with nine foot grey beards coming aboard at times. Our motorized autopilot works great in quiet water, but in the heaving seas and gusty winds, it wanted to send us off to Cuba. Finally, Ed took the helm and steered by hand the rest of the night, seven hours, explaining his tenacity by saying that at times one must have an "Oriental attitude about life." When We got up, at dawn, she turned the autopilot on -- and we fell off toward Cuba. So she steered until we reached Cay Sal Island, the main island of the Cay Sal Banks, where we anchored in ten feet clear, calm water with the island protecting us from wind and waves. There were some buildings on the is land where the Bahamian police men once lived, but they left when the freedom boats stopped. On 8 May, Happy Birthday Ed, we raised anchor and headed across the Gulf Stream for Key West, our home away from home. An airplane circled over then headed west, not over the banks which are littered with small islands. Sadly, we read later that some Cubans were starving on Dog Rocks, sixty miles NE of us, but the plane did not see them until a week later -- too late for three of them.
Key West! Like coming home. So many familiar places and faces. Friends we're glad to see again. We got Micro-cable TV. It's a dish that was intended to point to a broad cast tower on Key West. So, we mounted it on a pole which we stuck down a hatch over the table -- when the boat turned around, we turned the pole. Ed continued writing. Wendy joined a Bikram Yoga class: marine corps yoga. The water taxi took her ashore every day and brought her back after class. They took our laundry once a week: $5/load. She was in heaven. Ed's grandson Ben visited and went up in an ultralight and took a painting class. Oh boy, some one to see movies with. Ben and Wendy saw every movie, all snorkeled out by a wreck just a few hundred feet from where we'd anchored and saw lots of fish, even lobsters that walked over Ben's flippers.
In mid- July we sailed over night to Bimini for a week and explored and snorkeled the clear waters then sailed to Pompano Beach just north of Ft. Lauderdale. We parked the boat and moved into my brother Gerry's house for the summer while they're up north. Ed wrote and re-wrote Caribbean Kiss and finally sent the first 100 pages off to Jill Lamar, an agent in NY. A gentleman who was bone fishing in Andros had told us about her. Gerry and Marianne returned from up-north the last week of October, and invited us to continue our stay. We shared a few wonderful weeks and a great Thanksgiving dinner, but the time came to cast off before we wore out our welcome. But where shall we go? We saw an ad for an apartment just a few blocks from Gerry and Marianne. We bought yard sale furniture and, good grief, here we are, land lubbers for the next three months. We cautiously put dishes and glasses on the shelves, amazed that nothing fell off. Part of the justification for the apartment was to polish off Caribbean Kiss. But lo the fates; we got a rejection notice from Jill, the agent. Not to worry, Ed's such a cockeyed optimist, that he made a list of all her positive statements and treated the negative statements as points to work from.