CHAPTER 2

WHY THE BAHAMAS?

We had been told that cruising the Bahamas is manageable for a sailor with our level of experience. Even so we had many concerns about our capabilities to undertake a voyage of that magnitude. One look at the chart of the Bahamas, and you can begin to appreciate the sheer size of the area they cover, and in between these tiny islands is a heck of a lot of water.

Our cruising experience was perhaps better than most considering that in addition to cruising for 6 years on the Chesapeake Bay, we had chartered bare boats in the Virgin Islands on four occasions and in the Whitsunday Islands in Australia on another. Yet we had gained the majority of our sailing experience racing 16 foot one design centerboard sailboats on small midwestern inland lakes. True we had raced our J-24 on Lake Michigan for 3 summers, but that did little to qualify us for venturing into the North Atlantic Ocean during the winter.

Fortunately my wife had crewed for me throughout our sailing career. Learning the trade alongside me as it were. As we got older and moved up to larger yachts, she did more and more of the helm duty while I took on the sail handling and navigating tasks. We were doing very well until we woke up one calm morning to dense fog in a quiet Maryland Eastern Shore creek. I knew it would burn off in a few hours, but the creek was wide and the shallows were well marked so I decided to practice my dead reckoning skills and navigate us out into the Chesapeake Bay.

Everything was going along well. She was at the helm steering a compass course, while I was peering ahead and monitoring the speed, time and depth, having calculated the time when the next mark would appear out of the fog. After a while I noticed the depth was not right, so I checked the compass and found us traveling a course well away from the one I had specified. I discovered that without a fixed reference outside of the boat, my wife has difficulty steering a compass course. At that point Autohelm moved to the top of our "must have" list of equipment. That was many years ago, and on the new yacht we have GPS in addition to Autohelm, but the fact remains that she has never completely mastered the skill of steering a compass course.

The point of this is that some would think it sheer folly for us to venture off shore at all, let alone travel several hundred miles into the North Atlantic Ocean to cruise in the Bahamas. Fortunately the Bahamas are only a bit more difficult than coastal cruising if approached correctly. Having knowledge of what to expect is the most valuable commodity, but even those as ignorant as we were on that first cruise can make it.

In later chapters I will tell you about the "lessons learned" by getting into detail as to how to choose and equip the yacht and yourself for the trip, but here I want to give you a bit of a sales pitch for the Bahamas.

Studying the chart reveals several very important aspects of the archipelago. First the western most islands are very close to the coast of Florida. Second many of the islands are south of the South Florida peninsula and quite a few are south of the Florida Keys. Further study reveals that the climate in the winter is dry and mild. Temperatures north of Nassau can get chilly, but south of there it rarely goes below 70 degrees, and in fact when you are in the Exuma Cays and especially in the vicinity of Georgetown, Great Exuma the climate is downright Caribbean.

You don't go to the Bahamas in the summer time. For one thing the temperatures are much hotter, and the humidity is too high for comfort. Secondly it rains a lot in the summer. The majority of the annual rainfall occurs in the summer. Finally there are hurricanes. In fact live aboard cruising sailors leave the Bahamas and the northern Caribbean and head south every spring to Venezuela to avoid the threat of hurricanes.

Don't be fooled, the Bahamas are not in the Caribbean Sea, but they are far enough south to be in the trade winds, and the warm ocean current generated by that wind flows into the archipelago. The result is warm clear water that supports coral reef growth. My wife and I have snorkeled on many marvelous coral reefs in the Caribbean and the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, and the Bahamas have some of the best easily accessible snorkeling reefs we've seen. Not as monumental as those in Australia, but as good as any we found in the Caribbean, and a lot closer to home.

Many of the reefs found in the Florida Keys are quite nice, but the ones we snorkeled in the Exuma Cays are at least one order of magnitude and perhaps two better. Snorkeling can be for fun or food. Be sure to bring along your snorkeling gear.

About twenty years ago, shortly after the Bahamas gained their independence from the UK, several incidents of cruising yachts being attacked by drug traffickers and/or pirates in the Exumas were reported in the sailing press. At least one incident resulted in the disappearance and probable murder of the crew of a sailing vessel at or near Norman's Cay. The Bahamian Government appears to have solved those problems as we neither heard of or saw any crime against yachters anywhere in the Bahamas. In fact we were impressed by the helpfulness, kindness and honesty of the Bahamian people. We witnessed not a shred of hostility.

Between our two sailing trips My wife and I flew down to the Bahamas and took part in an Elderhostel program sponsored by and held at the Bahamian Field Station located on the north end of San Salvador Island. San Salvador is considered by many to be the first landfall in the New World by Christopher Columbus in 1492.

This Elderhostel program provided an immense amount of information about the Bahamas in general and San Salvador in particular. The Bahamian Field Station is managed by an arrangement between the Bahamian Government and 3 Universities located in up-state New York. The visionary that put the program together and sold the Universities and the Bahamian Government on the idea is a Professor of Geology by the name of Don Gerace. The Don, as he is usually addressed, has done a considerable amount of study of Bahamian Island geology and has explored San Salvador extensively. The Don drafted several other professors doing research on the island to show us the critters and vegetation, on land and in the water. San Salvador is nearly surrounded by barrier reefs making it a virtual snorkeling paradise. We snorkeled almost every afternoon on a different reef.

The program included lectures of the history of these Islands, both pre and post Columbian. We visited an archaeological dig being conducted by a group of post graduate students. They had discovered a pre Columbian village site, complete with evidence of trade activity between the island tribes and the mainland Americas. We were shown the laboratories they were using to preserve their finds, and curate collections. In addition to the university professors involved in research projects at the Field Station, The Don had teachers, ministers, farmers and colorful characters from the local communities lecture us on the present and past culture. He even had a local wood carver demonstrated his craft. It was a marvelous experience, and we recommend it highly.

As to the controversy about the location of Columbus' first landfall? The Don assured us that it was San Salvador.

• See Chance the Tide in our catalog.
  
  
• Back to main Excerpts page.