S/V Bentaña: Spanish Wells

The next morning, Thanksgiving Day, we spoke by VHF radio with Last Tango and Maribelle as they were arriving in our neck of the islands. They were planning on picking up moorings in Spanish Wells. That had also been our plan, so we said we would head up there later. Soon after that we got an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner on Maribelle, which we accepted. Ed and Vicky and the pups had dingyed up to Spanish Wells, about 5 miles away. They found Last Tango and Maribelle and went to say “HI” but everyone was napping after an overnight sail.

We weighed anchor, motored to Spanish Wells and found the mooring which cost $15 a day to use. We decided that we would make corn bread, dessert crepes and snappa ceviche to take as our contribution to the dinner. Understand that we do not have an oven aboard, so it was an experiment to bake the corn bread from a package of Jiffy Corn Muffin mix. We fashioned an 8” x 8” baking pan out of a disposable aluminum tray we had and cranked up the BBQ grill to bake the bread. It came out GREAT! The things you can do with imagination! (Kudos to my own Mrs McGyver.)The crepes were equally as tasty with apple butter or coconut butter spread on them.

We placed a phone call to Judy’s family for a Thanksgiving greeting. It was great to talk with them!

We dinked over for a full thanksgiving dinner on Maribelle with Becky and Kevin and Patty and Gary from Last Tango. The menu included snappa ceviche, homemade hummus as appetizers, oven roasted turkey breast, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, tropical cranberry sauce, corn bread, dessert crepes, pumpkin pie………..YUM!!! We all stuffed ourselves and had a great time together. Gary mentioned that Thanksgiving is incomplete without a round of Alice’s Restaurant. A few minutes later while we sat appropriately stuffed, Sirius Radio came through with the full twenty seven minute version. I must say that it is the first time I have ever heard everyone at the table sing it (in three part harmony)in tune, on cue and with gusto. We sure won that war!! Thank you, Arlo.

The mooring balls are located at the east end of Spanish Wells, between a sand bar which is uncovered at low tide, and a marshy island. When there was no wind, there WERE no see-ums, so up went the screens, which didn’t help much. L We watched a heron fishing on the edge of the sand bar and the fishermen catching bait fish in nets. This was a scene out of National Geographic, three guys on a small motorboat. One steers, one opens the live-well cover and the third tosses a net about six feet in circumference, weighted all around. He tosses it like a lasso which makes it spin open like a spinning skater’s skirt. It drops in the water five feet in front of the boat, and when he pulls it up, he has a couple of dozen flipping pilchards to dump in the bait barrel. These will be used as live bait in tuna fishing. The waters we’ve seen are often teeming with fish, and Kevin spotted a barracuda alongside Maribelle chasing and eating the pilchards.

The mooring fees are picked up by a guy nicknamed “Bandit,” aka Captain Jock Morgan, MBE, SC who is a marine pilot (not to be confused with marine pirate) and guides boats down the Devil’s Backbone to Harbour Island. He is a very interesting man born and raised in Spanish Wells and has been on the town planning board, farms, pilots boats as a licensed captain and is an archeologist in his spare time! (not to mention the royal title, MBE.)

Walking around town on Friday, we discovered that the artist rendered map truly WAS way out of scale. The Island of Spanish Wells is very long and narrow and the map is condensed (like a wide screen movie) so that it fits on the paper. Hoofing it to the grocery store appeared to be as short as walking from the river to the ocean (about three blocks, but in reality it was more than a mile. It became a real arduous trek because it was very hot with the sun beating down, and I (Judy) had eaten many conch fritters for lunch which were sitting in my stomach like lead weights. On our way to the store we took a detour to the beach on the ocean side, and Steph enjoyed “walking on water” in the shallow lagoon between the shore and the barrier reef. We visited the local cemetery and finally made it to the supermarket. As usual, we picked up more that it was easy to carry and I mentioned to Steph that I didn’t think I would be able to walk all the way back to the boat. We had decided to see if we could hitch a ride on one of the golf carts which are the main mode of transportation there. Before we even stuck out a thumb, Alethia stopped in her golf cart and asked if she could give us a ride. We gratefully accepted her kind offer. J Thank you Universal Energy and the Power of Intention!