currently at: Lisbon Creek, Andros, Bahamas current date: 8 May 2005

We would have liked to have spent more time at the Grassy Creek Cays, but a cold front was coming and we needed a place with more protection from the west and north. We did get one day of snorkeling, and walked around on one of the little islands where we saw a few water bottles and a tarp - someone's rudimentary camp, I guess. The cays' inhabitants are mostly birds - laughing gulls and brindled terns, we think - along with an assortment of lizards and big gray biting flies. The local name for them is "doctor fly", because their bite feels like you're being given a shot.

Around noon we set out for South Bight, but the southeast wind was too light and the seas too big to make much progress, so the motor was on much of the way. We caught a small mahi-mahi on the way, the first one we have caught since our first week in the Bahamas! The entrance is wide and easy, but once inside the Bight (which is actually a wide and shallow tidal creek that runs completely across Andros Island) we couldn't find the dredged channel to Lisbon Creek with the late afternoon sun reflecting from the water, so we felt our way across the Bight to the lee of Forsyth Point and anchored there for the night.

For the next day's predicted frontal passage, though, we wanted more protection. The next morning we set out in the dinghy with the lead line and portable GPS. With the sun overhead the channel was obvious. It's even "marked": there's what looks like a Chlorox bottle float on a line near the beginning of the channel, too small to see unless you know exactly where to look, which of course misses the whole point of a channel marker. Using the lead line, we determined a clear path for the big boat that would get us to the dredged channel without going aground. Which was important, because it was just about low tide and dropping. But we transferred our waypoints from the little GPS to the big one, lifted anchor, and made it to Lisbon Creek without losing any more bottom paint.

Lisbon Creek is also a tidal estuary rather than a true river, so the current switches direction with the tide. (Actually, this is oddly not quite the case at Lisbon Creek; we noticed that the current direction lags the tide by at least an hour. For example, the current flows out through the lowest tide, and then the tide rises - but the current continues flowing out! We suspect this is because Lisbon Creek joins South Bight at both ends, so the tide affects both ends of the creek and somehow results in this strange and nonintuitive current pattern.) The current is strong enough to overwhelm the wind, so we set two anchors in what is called the Bahamian moor: one upstream and one downstream. Windom pivots around its bow as the current switches, but stays in more or less the same place, which is also a good thing when we are anchored, as we are here, in a relatively narrow waterway.

There is a small settlement here, also called Lisbon Creek. We went ashore for a walk; there is a concrete dock where the mailboat calls, a restaurant and "guest house" across the street (somehow I doubt Lisbon Creek is high on the Andros tourist route!), and a handful of other houses. The grocery store is about the size of a one-car garage. When we walked by, a tiny tabby kitten was dozing in the open doorway. We stopped to give it a scritch, and a man called out from the house next door, "You want anything from the store?" We walked up to the house and asked if they had ice cream (no) or cold drinks (yes). A soda pop? We were directed to go down to the store and pick what we wanted out of the fridge, then we returned to the house to pay.

As we walked down the street, a man watering his lawn greeted us, and we stopped to chat. His name was Cecil Longley, and he is a deputy minister for Education, back at his hometown on vacation from his job in Nassau. Mr. Longley told us that back in his grandfather's day Lisbon Creek was the center of boatbuilding in the Bahamas: "They built fishing smacks, three-masted sailing schooners. Used to be, there were nine boats here." More recently the Lisbon Creek boatbuilding yard made Bahamian racing sloops for the various intra-Bahamas regattas, and we saw one such racing sloop in a vacant lot beside the road, looking dilapidated and neglected. It's unsurprising this was a boatbuilding community, since Andros is heavily forested with pine and mahogany.

Mr. Longley told us the same story that we've heard in so many Out Island communities: the young people go to Nassau and Freeport to get an education and get jobs, and few of them return to the settlement where they were raised. So Lisbon Creek is dying, like so much of the Bahamas. In this case tourism will not come to the rescue; Andros is a large island, not one of the picturesque little cays with palm trees and white sand beaches, and the reefs are on the windward side where diving is dependent on the rare calm weather. Not many yachts visit Andros, and few of them venture this far south. There are a few dive resorts and bonefishing operations on the island, but there isn't much in Lisbon Creek.

What there is: there are a lot of "doctor flies". Also a lot of mosquitos and no-see-um gnats, tiny things with big teeth. We keep our screens in and our hatch closed, and we don't spend a lot of time in the cockpit. There are a lot of clouds, because Andros is big enough to cause land-effect convection - the sun heats the land faster than it heats the water, and the heat rises and creates big cumulus clouds in the afternoon. We got one good rainstorm that helped add to our water supply and washed off our salty decks.

Right now the wind is howling from the northeast in the wake of the cold front, catching Windom sideways and sounding a lot worse than it really is. As soon as the wind drops and shifts a little more easterly, we'll head north toward Middle Bight.