February 16 – March 23, 2024; 12888 nm and 1829 days after departure from La Rochelle

I’m so excited 🎶- I just can’t hide it! I keep having these words of the song in my mind because I’m so, so happy. Next week Jana and Benoit are coming to visit us. Yippeeeee. They just spend almost three month in South America and for their last two weeks of their sabbatical they planned to hang out with their old folks. What a great decision🙃! As closer the time gets as more excited I get! I just can’t hide it…dadadadada…
As the Bahamas are such a big archipelagic state with 3000 islands, cays and islets, we had to find an island which was easy to reach for all of us.(Wikipedia describes its’ territory as encompassing 470,000 km² of ocean space with only 30 inhabited islands.) But recommendations from other sailors had made the decision easy. Georgetown/Great Exuma was the place to meet. It is located somewhere in the middle of the Bahamas with even an international airport, a fairly good supermarket and a laundry. All we needed to get Altimate ready for our visitors and the kids to fly in.

Before coming to George Town we spent about three weeks in the Ragged islands. (My bet, they were named like that because they were indeed very ragged.) All the islands of the chain and actually as well all the other islands we visited were densely vegetated with shrub and tree thickets. Once in a while single coconut trees found their way through the thicket. The shoreline was primarily rocky, with patches of sandy beach and sometimes salt marsh. All in all… well, ragged. With Lady Seagull we made our way slowly up the chain. Lobstering, fishing, snorkelling, exploring the shoreline and meeting new sailors was our daily business. Oh yeah…we did have a hard life! My favourite stop was at an islet with the name Jamaica Cay. There we were alone only with Lady Seagull. It felt a bit like living Robinson Crusoe life. The boys were further improving their lobstering skills and I got pretty skilled in opening conch. A conch is a type of snail that lives in warm coastal waters. It is easy to pick but hard to get out of its shell if one doesn’t know how to do it. Thanks to YouTube I learned how to do it and meanwhile I manage to get it out pretty fast. I don’t know if anybody is interested but I explain anyhow how to open it, because I’m so proud😉. To remove the animal from its shell I use a hammer to hit it firmly between the second and third row of humps until a maybe 3cm slit is created. Then I drive a dull knife into the gap and try to cut through the tendon that connects the snail to its shell. Et voilà, the legitimate homeowner allows himself to be pulled out of his home using his horn foot without any resistance.

Btw, we also learned that conch meat is excellent for fishing with a hand line. The fish were crazy about conch meat. Within only minutes we caught fish for dinner. One day I even pulled a remora out of the water. Remoras are slender fish which like to hitchhike preferably on sharks, whales and dolphins. Thanks to their soft rays on their flat head which act like a suction cup they can easily dock to bigger animals. Kind of fascinating! And yes, fishing was easy.
At Jamaica Cay somebody had apparently tried to start to built a resort years ago. The remaining buildings were still visible including two big 40 feet tank trailer which were unfortunately not yet overtaken by nature. A brownie point was the result of the resort-building-persons’ effort to plant coconut palm trees. There were plenty and they were full of green (hanging) coconuts and even more older ones on the floor. We do love coconut water! It’s delicious and healthy. Especially since we had already run out of most of our veggies and all of our fruits. Now we had another task to master and could play more Robinson. Well, don’t get too excited, even though that would have been awesome… but we did not manage to climb up the trees like skilled little monkeys, sorry. We did though leverage El Capitano’s height and picked the ones he could reach by hand or with a stick. Luckily there were enough nuts reachable that he could collect everyday as much to fill up a 1,5 l bottle with coconut water. Opening the green ones was not a problem for El Capitano anymore as he had done it many times before in the San Blas. Opening the older already brown ones was much harder. The outer shell gets soft and fibrous and is really difficult to get off the nut you actually want. Even the machete didn’t help much as it just bounced back. So far our best way was smashing the nuts against a hard surface with their head or butt until they start to open a little. Then we had to do a hard workout. Challenging our pecs by pulling off the hairy fibrous and very protecting cover. My workout teacher Ann would have been so proud of me!!! After a while, it really depended on the endurance of our muscles we got rewarded with the actual coconut🥥.

Although the hunting and collecting took some time of our daily routine, it didn’t stop us from having nice sundowners with Joe and Cathy, strolls around the islands or making garbage fires. After a few days it was unfortunately again time to say goodbye to our new friends Cathy and Joe from Lady Seagull. They needed to get going as they had ordered a part to hopefully repair their auto pilot. That part was due to arrive soon in Stanley/Exumas. We stayed a few days longer and enjoyed the loneliness of the anchorage. Already being in an exploring food mood and ready for a new dinner taste, we started to collect whelks. Some sailors mentioned they were very delicious. And as we had seen many of them on the rocks close to shore in the tidal area we gave them a try. It was another kind of sea snail only much smaller than conch. Boiled they were easy to remove of their shell. Shortly buttered in garlic they made a nice fish tasty pasta dish. Approved like that they made it on our diet plan for future dish options.
Our further plan was to arrive about 10 days before the kids would arrive at George Town (GT). We still had about 2 weeks time and 150nm to go depending on where we would stay on our way there. The wind was great to let us nicely sail to Water cay, the last anchorage before leaving the Ragged islands. Btw, sailing in the Bahamas was sometimes outstanding. It was just like flying over only 2m depth of water. The protection of the reefs and islands offered a lake like sailing in absolutely dream like waters. Pure sailing excitement in absolute best conditions!!! If you want to start sailing – do it here!

Well, we kept going after a one night stop at Water Cay and headed up 50 nm northeast to Long Island where we were hoping to get some fresh groceries as it was one of the inhabited islands. Regarding fresh food, the small grocery store hadn’t much to offer. Yet, chatting with some locals, we learned that Saturdays a small farmers market provided local food. A very good reason for us to stay the few days and explore the area a bit. Originally we wanted to rent a car as the island was quite long (of course it was, absolutely name related😉!) and visiting a few sights would have been nice. Somehow we couldn’t get hold of the car rental owner hence we couldn’t get a car. So exploring was limited to what we could do by foot and dinghy. That was not much so we were focused on just chatting with locals and one afternoon we treated ourselves with a burger at a pretty beach bar. The farmers market turned out to be surprisingly good. We were able to buy tomatoes, eggs, papaya, lettuce, lime, bananas, eggplant, arugula, cucumbers and a local fruit named gugu. Luxuriant provisioned like that we decided to visit Conception Island. Again an uninhabited island located 20nm east of the northern tip of Long Island and only about 40 nm away from GT.

Like always after setting the anchor we jumped in the water to check on it or rather enjoy just a quick and beautiful cooldown swim. El Capitano was already back on board while I was still floating. My eyes caught a conch so I dove down to have a closer look. Coming up thinking about whether we need a conch or not I saw him. A, probably only mid size, but for me pretty big looking Lemon shark was watching me. And he was close by. Arghhh. I did not like that! I know, I know sharks are usually not interested in humans but I thought he did look interested in me🙈. Brave, as I pretended to be, I slowly went back to protecting Altimate. It shouldn’t have but that unexpected encounter stopped me from longer swims for the next couple of days. Fortunately after that we didn’t have any more unpleasant gatherings. The days went by pretty fast and when the wind was favourable we set sail direction GT.
What a change of scenery! GT is the sailor hub in The Bahamas. Hundreds and hundreds of boats gathered together. After 5 weeks of remote island life it was nice diving into socializing. Yoga, music gigs, basketball, dinghy drifts, volleyball… you name it , everything was possible. We of course jumped into volleyball and enjoyed the game as well meeting many new people. Meanwhile we have been here for just over a week and as the arrival date of the kids is getting closer and closer…you know what comes now: I’m so excited 🎶- I just can’t hide it dadadadadadadaaaaa