Day 7: Arrival in Spanish Wells

Tom and Bette, armed with their Bahamas phone chips, were in regular touch with Robert of R&B boat yard about the time of their haulout.  It was Tom's hope to go directly into the lift.  But a haulout facility is a busy place, needing to deal with emergencies as well as scheduled hauls.  So, after hurrying us up here to Eleuthera a couple of days early, now Robert needed to delay us a bit.  So we enjoyed a leisurely morning and motored up the hour's hop to Spanish Wells midday.

 

Spanish Wells is an island -- well actually three islands, Charles and Russel being tucked up against Spanish Wells like baby whales --situated at the top curve of Eleuthera's island group.  To the north/ Atlantic side is a reef structure that begins above Royal Island and wraps east over Spanish Wells, the top promontory of neighboring Eleuthera and around to famous Harbor Island, the most tortuous part of which is called the Devil's Backbone and requires a pilot to safely traverse it.  That, of course, is an area known for good diving and snorkeling.  Sigh.  But we weren't here for watersports.  We were here for a bottom job.

Eleuthera means freedom, and the community of Spanish Wells dates back to the 1600s when a group seeking religious freedom set out from England, explaining the island-wide accents that are very broad and New England-y. Spanish Wells is renowned for its fishing fleet, which is said to bring in more than half of the Bahamas catch of lobster.  The community of Spanish Wells fills up the whole island (officially named St. George's Cay, but rarely called anything other than Spanish Wells) and spills over a bridge onto Russell Island.  Downtown, the houses are small, neat, and reminiscent of New England beach cottages but for their bright tropical color combinations.  Moving west, the lots get bigger and the houses also, built of more contemporary materials like concrete and stucco with some elaborate gardens.

The entry channel to Spanish Wells is a winding "S" through the shallows of slightly deeper blue with channel markers that don't exactly jump put and identify themselves.  

Quantum Leap is a big wide boat, so it was comforting to know sisterships had gone in before us.  Little did we realize that we were shrimps compared to the many boats of Spanish Wells' professional lobster fleet, not to mention the Fast Ferry from Nassau!

R&B was not ready for us.  A work barge, freshly painted yellow, was tying up the lift, something incomplete.  

We went alongside the fuel dock at Pinder Fuel & Grocery to sort things out.  Bette had made an awesome red lentil stew with sweet potato, carrot and chayote for our lunch featuring a dollop of "fufu" sunk in 

 FuFu is as a starch, of African orgigin, often of cassava but in this case made of plantain flour that Bette found on the shelves of the grocery in Governor's Harbor.  With a belly-full of that, the crew was ready to snooze, but we could not tie up Pinder's dock much longer.  It developed that R&B couldn"t take us until Friday morning, so we moved off to another dock tucked very close under the high bow of a lobster boat, Sea Gem.  With nothing much to do at this point, we all went down for that nap, a pleasant snooze despite the clatter passing golf carts and the mutter of life on the adjacent commercial dock.  

Then all nappers were abruptly awaked by the arrival of the fast ferry, whose dock it seemed was just ahead of us.  The noise was tremendous, but it hardly held a candle to the size of the thing.  Compared to this thing, Quantum Leap is a baby cat.

Still in suspense about the timing of things, we finally treated ourselves to dinner at a restaurant we could readily walk to, The Ship Yard, an "upscale" place clearly going for the tourist trade located right at the east tip of the island. It was a pretty place, with free wifi (which we all scrurried to use), but the menu was quite pricey and the meals, in hindsight, not as exciting as the price would suggest.  Hard to beat Bette Lee's cooking!

But the walk home along the quiet streets betwen quaint cottages in sweet color schemes put us in a mood to be receptive to Spanish Wells' charms.  Tomorrow would be another day.