January 20, 2009

Long Island, Bahamas
Long Island, most likely our last stop in Bahamas. The last two weeks we hopped from island to island, traversing through Exuma Cays with its many shades and tints of blue water…light blue, sky blue, turquoise, navy, sapphire blue…you name the hue and it’s somewhere here. The crystal clear water, besides making it so easy to observe the rich sea life, allows us to navigate safely around the many shoals and coral heads. Food in Exumas is incredibly expensive, everything arrives by boat and there is no agriculture on these rugged little islands. We didn’t buy red pepper for $8.50 a pound, neither did we treat ourselves to milk for $9.50! (dried milk is nothing to turn the nose up to, and that gives us so much more space in our fridge for other stuff one can obtain on these island, like cabbage, or maybe some carrots!). Small loaf of bread, that tastes more like a cake, sells for $6US! And so, we are proudly reporting, that today, we successfully baked our second loaf of bread! Czech recipe I obtained from Internet was my contribution, while J-P did his part in this process by mixing and all the five minutes of kneading required for a heavenly taste. We will never be without decent bread again! Also our first - converting salt water to drinking water. Our Reverse Osmosis Water Maker is performing as advertised. And so we will never stay dirty for too long again! We are quite self-sufficient now – the sun (solar panels), yeast, flour and some fish – we can survive whatever, wherever! Here on Long Island there is even some agriculture going on - right now it’s a season for papaya, tomato, okra – and all this for pennies! Finally some decent prices! Today, once-a-week ship arrived from Nassau, with all kinds of goodies, so tomorrow, with a crew from “Chenou”, that we sailed here with, we are renting a car and besides admiring beauties of this island, we will hit some food and liquor stores to stock-up on essentials before heading to Cuba. We read in American paper there is food shortage in Cuba (propaganda?) after getting hit by three hurricanes this summer (possibility?) We will let you know.

January 9, 2009

Highborne Cay, Bahamas

Finally, the first fish – just for two, small Amberjack, on the way to Royal Island, and first lobster (2), which I spotted while swimming around Nikan, always with my goggles on, keeping a sharp lookout around me for imagined or maybe real? danger from watching too many adventure movies in the past. Still, it took J-P good half an hour to spear them out of their holes and they made an excellent supper (barbecued) on a New Year’s Day. We couldn’t have had it fresher than that! And just before that we spent hours searching the reef, while all this time they lived their soon too short life just few meters away from us. Next we sailed to Spanish Wells, prosperous island with easy going and friendly locals, almost empty food store after the holidays, with a ship full of provision due sometime soon. We were lucky to meet a friendly local who offered us a lift in her golf cart (which we really didn’t need, one can probably walk around the whole island in an hour!) but with a bucket full of tomatoes from her daughter’s garden and she very generously shared with us, as the ones in the store were half dead. Golf carts and cars create no stop procession on the main street, which we found quite amazing, considering how small the island is. Few days later, after zigzagging for a full day over the sand bank full of coral heads and shallow water on the way to Exuma Cays, we stopped for several days in Allan’s Cay (one of the remaining habitats of iguanas in the Bahamas), just relaxing and fishing every day on surrounding reef with zilch result! Too many boats, it looks here all fished out. There are about six Canadian sailboats here, definitely outnumbering Americans. Only “Voila” we are travelling with is English speaking. Tomorrow we will move to a marina for a day to touch base with civilization (understand Internet!), to update this blog, do some laundry, and to see what provisions we can find. Some fresh fruit would come handy. And! J-P decided to update his culinary skills by baking some bread, unfortunately we couldn’t find any multigrain flour here (oh, why we didn’t shop more on American continent!), only white variety of anything and everything is available here. But more on that next time.