A week in the Bahamas

A post by Mark
Hi all,
We’ve had a good week or so since I last wrote.

We stayed a bit longer in Bimini than we planned – as it took 8 days to get a weather window through which we could travel. Life on Bimini was good – we met some great folks, ate some good food, did a little fishing, enjoyed the beach, climbed the mast, and visited the Dolphin Museum.

The highlights:

Friends
We made some great friends – Carly, Alfredo, and their 9 (almost 10 YO) daughter Sophie. They are great folks – and Sophie and Sally were nearly inseparable by the time we left the island. We will keep in touch and really hope that we meet up again sooner rather than later.

We also spent a few hours with another cool boat family on South Bimini. Lastly, we met a bunch of other sailors at a happy-hour type gathering at a neighboring marina where we got some great tips on where to go throughout the islands.

Food
For the most part, we’ve eaten every meal on our boat since we left Racine, except when were visiting family in FL. On Bimini, we treated ourselves to some great conch salad. It was fantastic – very simple – chopped conch, onion, pepper, tomatoes, garlic salt and lime juice – and delicious. The folks at Joe’s Conch shack de-shell the conch when you order your salad and prepare everything right in front of you. So tasty! There was a side benefit as well – conch slop. Conch slop is the slimy, disgusting mess of that is cleaned from the edible meat of the conch. While it is really gross – it is fantastic fishing bait (more to come about that). Our other Bimini treat was coconut Bimini bread. Bimini bread is a really tasty, sweet white bread. The day we went to Charlie’sbread bakery, he was just finishing up a batch of coconut bread – which we could not resist. It was very, very tasty. It made a great breakfast!

Joe’s Conch Shack

Fishing
On our crossings, we haven’t had any luck catching anything – as most of the time, we’ve beeb sailing through the ‘good’ fishing areas at night. At the dock, we had better luck. Using our conch slop as bait, we caught about 10 fish over a few days – 2 were ‘keepers’. We ate one the night we caught it  (yummy) and have the other in the freezer (as it is supposed to be good in fish stew – but we need more fish for that).

The Beach
Bimini is known mostly for fishing – as it lies right off the Gulf Stream, so it is less than a mile from the dock to great bluewater sport fishing. While it doesn’t have the typical tropical beaches you find in the guidebooks, we made due with two small beaches that were a few minutes walk from our boat. When we first arrived in Bimini, the first thing we did after clearing customs was to walk to Radio Beach and go swimming. It was great – the water was clear and warm(ish) and there were pretty shells all around. About 10 minutes after we got to the beach, the cold-front that kept us in Bimini for 8 days blew in and cooled us down significantly – but it was still nice. A little closer to our marina was a small, un-named beach on the point of land that makes up the southern end of North Bimini. When we first arrived, it was littered with trash – mostly plastic and other junk that looks like it washed ashore. It seems as though all of the floating junk that comes by Bimini ended up on that beach. The 2nd day, we met-up with a Bahamian work crew that was collecting trash and helped them for about an hour. It was fun to help out – made us feel a bit less like tourists. This little beach was great for sea glass – as it seemed like all of the glass in the area washed up here as well. In our time in Bimini, we collected about 2 mayonnaise jars full of sea glass (and we didn’t spend all that long looking)! Lastly, our little un-named beach is where we would hang out with Willie – running up and down the beach, digging in the sand, and chasing sticks and coconuts into the water. Lucy did a great job tiring Willie out there each afternoon.

The Mast!
On our passage from Marathon to Bimini, our wind indicator decided to quit working. So, I ended up climbing the mast to take it down so I could try to fix it. It was really windy all week – so it was challenging at best. After I did my climbing, the rest of the family tried as well – and all had some fun. A few days later, I tried to put the indicator back on the mast – but only got 2/3 or so of the way up before I turned around. It was too windy for me to keep going – I was getting tired of getting banged around the mast – and I guess got a bit scared. Heidi, however, really wanted to climb the mast – so up she went. She flew up with what seemed like little effort and worked on the wind indicator. Looks like we found our new mast climber!

The Dolphin House / Museum
On our second day in Bimini, we met Carly and Sophie – and they brought Julie and the girls to the Dolphin Museum (I took Willie for a longer walk – and after hearing the stories of the museum, I wish I had joined them and walked Willie later). From what I pieced together from their stories, the Dolphin Museum is a 25 year-old work in process. It is a house, built by one man (Ashley), entirely of recycled materials with all of the design and artwork inspired by dolphins. A visit to the museum is a guided tour around the house by Ashley – where he tells one heck of a story. As he tells it, his life changed one day when swimming with the dolphins. On that swim, he connected telepathically with them, and now sees the world in full color through the eyes of a dolphin. He has since dedicated his life to creating his shrine to the dolphins. No – I’m not making this stuff up…. Like I said – I think I missed a good one here. Oh well – Willie and I did have a good walk.

So, as you can see, we had a good time on Bimini.

Next stop – Allen’s Cay in the Exumas (where i’m typing this now…). Our adventure keeps getting better – more details to come.

Until then,
Mark