currently at:  Samana Cay, Bahamas
current date: 10 March 2005

We've been at Samana Cay for over a week now. One day a catamaran pulled in late in the afternoon and left early the next day, and another time a powerboat that looked like a dive boat did the same, but other than that it's just been us and Ithaka. Although oddly, yesterday we saw someone walking on one of the beaches, but saw no boat and no dinghy. Maybe he was a ghost, walking the ruins of the settlement that used to be here in the 1950s. We took one small hike among these ruins and found the local deacon's gravestone (1906-1966), numerous decayed stone buildings, and sisal plants growing in what must once have been neat rows.

We've also combed the beaches for interesting debris; among the plastic motor oil bottles, random shoes, and fishing-net floats, we found two small fenders in fairly good condition. We walked through the currently-empty fishermen's camp, and made one aborted attempt to bushwhack across the island. Our daily snorkeling expeditions have fed us well on lobster, grouper, and conch. There's a lot of dead coral here, unfortunately, but the surviving elkhorn formations are stunning, and the coral heads form interesting canyons and mazes that usually hide tasty fish.

Yesterday we took Douglas and Bernadette aboard Windom and motored down along the uncharted south coast to the detached cays on Samana's eastern tip, looking for a possible break in the reef that we thought we'd spotted from the top of a small hill on one of our walks. As soon as we left the anchorage, we were in the wilderness, as none of our charts of the island show any detail at all outside of this one small area. What a spooky feeling, sliding along a reefy coast, watching the water, watching the depthsounder. There's some evidence that Samana was Columbus's first landfall in the New World; perhaps he sailed the same route we took, scanning the reef as we did, but he had no charts at all, no GPS, no electronic depthsounder, no engine. Just taking our little step off the chart was scary enough. (We didn't find any other entrance or other anchorage - I think you'd have to explore from the inside in a small boat or dinghy with a portable depthsounder to really check out the coast safely.)

It's not an unalloyed paradise, though, because this is one of the rolliest anchorages we've ever been in. Our strategy has been to move from one part of it to another, choosing our meager protection depending on the wind, while Ithaka stays serenely anchored in the middle, splitting the difference. Perhaps we roll a little less than they do for our efforts, perhaps not. Last night the wind built out of the southwest, and by this morning it was a steady 20-25 knots; we had anchored close to the offlying Propellor Cay, and as the tide dropped and the surrounding reef became exposed, the protection improved. But as we ate lunch (fresh triggerfish sausage and the last of the broccoli I'd bought in Staniel Cay) the squall heralding the frontal passage hit us, and we moved into the cockpit with our plates, watching the reefy edge of the cay approach as Windom swung around to face northwest. The pair of ospreys that we'd watched with binoculars the previous afternoon cawed angrily, as our boat got too close for comfort for both them and us, and with the first drops of rain our engine was on and we were lifting anchor, moving back to join Ithaka. If the windshift to the north persists - our forecast sources differ - we may move even closer to the beach on the Samana side. If it switches back to south, back we'll go to the Propellor Cay side. Or maybe, whatever the wind, we'll head on out and go somewhere else. We've got just over two weeks before we have to be back in Staniel to pick up guests, and there are still more islands out here to explore.