Currently at:  Samana Cay, Bahamas
Current date:  2 March 2005

On the BASRA (Bahamas Air-Sea Rescue Association) weather net every morning, boats reporting weather conditions also include a count of how many cruising boats are in the harbor with them. With the Cruiser's Regatta a little more than a week away, George Town has nearly four hundred; counting every anchorage in the Bahamas, from crowded Marsh Harbour to little-visited Mayaguana, there are probably over twice that many - say 1000 yachts, give or take. A nice round number. Sounds like a lot of people, doesn't it?

I know that there are boats we never see, people we never meet. But from our perspective, it seems like we are always hearing the same names on the VHF and SSB radios, seeing the same familiar boats island after island, swimming in a very small pond. That in itself isn't surprising, as most Bahamas cruisers ply only a small subset of the hundreds of islands. What has surprised us is the sheer "networkiness" of the cruisers' web.

We drove Windom out of the anchorage at Big Major's Spot and pulled up to the little anchorage closest to Staniel Cay to pick up our laundry (and get some wireless internet access) before moving to a more protected anchorage just to the north. While there, the dinghy from Cantaloupe Island pulled up; "You're the friends of Heiner and Marleyne on La Buena Vida!  We heard so much about you!"  (We spent quite a bit of time with La Buena Vida in the ICW and Bahamas our first winter, and visited Heiner and Marleyne in Kingston, Ontario on our RV trip back to Colorado.)  A few days later we jumped south to the Leaf Cay anchorage by the Caribbean Marine Research Center on Lee Stocking Island and met Siqqittuq and Varuna 1, both also friends of La Buena Vida; then at a cocktail party on Varuna 1 we met Ted and Beth on Plankton, and it turned out that we'd met Ted's father on his boat Windsong (which is also a Caliber 40 like Windom) in Titusville, our first year.

So there may be a lot of cruisers out here, but it seems to us almost like an extended family, a whole bunch of people who are all tenuously related to each other. And like any family, we're all very different. A Montreal salesman, a Newport magazine editor, a Baffin Island banker, a Colorado meteorologist - what could such disparate people have in common?  Nothing except our "family" - our shared connection through cruising.

But cruising is self-selecting; we've met people we love and people we are merely polite to (sort of like a family!), but we've met very few real jerks. All of us are adventurous, willing to try new things, interested enough in the real world around us to do without television and shopping malls for a winter or a year or a lifetime. We're all intelligent enough to learn the skills needed to live and travel on a small boat. And we have that in common - when all else fails, we can always talk about spearing fish or anchor selection or navigation. But we've found that boat talk makes up only a small part of our cocktail party conversation, because just about everybody seems to have interesting lives and unique stories.

For now, though, we've left just about all socializing behind, other than with Ithaka, with whom we continue to travel. After an overnight passage from Leaf Cay, we are now at one of the most remote and least-visited islands of the Bahamas, Samana Cay. But that's another story...