currently at:  Raccoon Cay, Jumentos, Bahamas
current date: 27 April 2005

The weather here has been alternating between blowing stink from more or less the east, and calm, pleasant days of light wind and bright sunshine. This is a good thing, because the anchorages here are mostly just lee anchorages, coves scalloped out of the west sides of the cays. We have had every one of them to ourselves since Flamingo Cay, having apparently left even the fishing boats behind. Every once in a while we see an outboard skiff with a few men in it, maybe going to or from Duncan Town, the only community in these islands, but other than that we're the only two human beings out here. Amazingly enough, we still get along with each other (at least most of the time).

The Jumentos seem wild and remote, and in some sense they are. Duncan Town has about 70 inhabitants and no scheduled air service; we're about 12 miles from there, 80 miles (by boat) from Clarence Town on Long Island or George Town on Great Exuma, the nearest towns of any real size, and perhaps 200 miles from Nassau. And yet we are connected to the rest of the world over our SSB, listening to NPR's Morning Edition via the American Forces Network over breakfast, talking with friends on the marine band and ham nets, and sending and receiving email twice a day. We have ice for our cocktails, and fresh vegetables and fruits to go alongside the fish we catch and cook. It's hard for us to imagine what it must have been like in the late 18th century, when these islands were settled by British Loyalists who no longer felt welcome in the Colonies when they became States.

Many Loyalists were from the plantation states, and it probably sounded like a good deal to them to pack up and start new plantations on these exotic, unknown Bahamian islands. After all, other Crown possessions in the Caribbean, such as Jamaica, were lush, mountainous islands with rich soil that easily produced crops such as sugar cane and fruits. Why not the Bahamas?

Well, as anyone who has ever been here knows, despite being geographically close to Jamaica, the Bahamas are geologically unrelated. These flat limestone cays don't have much soil to speak of, no freshwater creeks, and pretty much nothing grows here other than scrubby trees such as poisonwood. And yet people came, bringing their slaves, expecting to make a living off the land.

We've seen Loyalist-era ruins on many of the Exuma cays, and we are seeing them here in the Jumentos as well. In the Exumas, though, at least Nassau, the big capital city where supplies could be obtained for (of course) a high fee, isn't that far away. I can't imagine what it would have been like trying to settle down here. But people tried; on Nurse Cay, near some ruins, we found an inscription carved into the limestone, "1866 J M", and here on Raccoon Cay we have seen pasture walls of limestone rock that extend across nearly the entire island, and the tracery of foundations, outlines of buildings that are long gone.

And so are the Loyalists, who for the most part packed up and left when they realized that these scrubby islands were unsuitable for agriculture. The Bahamians living here today are descendants of their slaves, who were left behind. (Which incidentally is why there are only about a few dozen different surnames among Bahamians - the slaves took the last name of their owner. So on Great Exuma, for example, about every other person has the last name Rolle!)

We're getting close to being ready to leave as well. We're looking for the next good weather window to cross toward Crooked Island, and then we'll work our way back north and west. Our big motivator is our watermaker, which had a critical part failure about a week ago. We made a temporary fix, but the company warned us that it may only continue working for "a few days or weeks", so we are headed toward a rendevous with one of their reps who will be cruising in the Exumas in a few weeks, carrying a new part for us. In these uninhabited islands, we can't obtain more water - we did find some inland water holes on Nurse Cay, but when we tested them for salinity they pegged the meter, too brackish for drinking. We got one rainy squall at Buena Vista Cay and deployed the rain catching system Britt built in Florida out of a shower curtain and some bungee cords - there are still a few bugs in the system, but we managed to get several gallons into our tank. For now, we're babying the watermaker and making a little every day to balance what we use; our small tank is about full, which will give us about a week's reserve if the watermaker gives out altogether - enough to get somewhere we can buy water.