Abacos (Mis)Adventures: Day 1

While I was in Michigan pretending to be a responsible adult for a week or two, Grace and Lynn were adventuring on Elpis, sailing from New Providence to Spanish Wells with plans to meet me in Marsh Harbour on a Tuesday afternoon. When my plane landed, I saw that I had a few messages from Grace. The texts were pretty vague, but the general gist appeared to be that she and Lynn weren’t anywhere near Marsh Harbour. An hour away? I asked. Maybe two? Grace’s cell phone service was minimal, but she was able to convey that they were probably several hours out still. I Googled hotel rooms in the Abacos. $400. Ha.

I ended up walking to the Abaco Beach Resort, where I found a crowded pool deck and restaurant with an octagon-shaped bar. I looked around. With yacht charter crews sitting at the restaurant tables and tourists crowding the pool, the bar looked like the best place I could wait and not be in anyone’s way. I sat down at an unoccupied length of the octagon and decided the only reasonable action I could take while waiting out the unidentified amount of hours until Elpis arrived was to order a Kalik Gold, the official beer of the Bahamas. I wondered how late I could stay at the bar until they’d ask me to leave. I wondered how many Kalik Golds was too many Kalik Golds. And after about an hour, I really had to pee.

I noticed two friendly-looking gentlemen sitting at the leg of the octagon adjacent to me, and I asked if they would mind watching my bags while I used the restroom. After I returned, they introduced themselves as Justin and Jay, working on a private sportfishing boat, and they began to ask questions. Was I a stewardess on a yacht? No. Who was I? Excellent question. We were doing this trip as two women on a sailboat? Well we were going to do it as men, but… (eye roll). I explained in what I thought was a nonchalant, breezy manner about the boat trip and that my sailboat was several hours away and actually I was unsure where I was going to sleep that night.

Justin and Jay proved to be kind fishing people who also were in possession of a very fast center console. Jay, who knew the Abacos well, talked to Grace on the phone, figured out her exact location, told her to drop the anchor, offered to powerboat me out there, AND picked up my bar tab. On the sail over from Eleuthera, Grace and Lynn had caught a tuna, so we stopped back at the guys’ boat and grabbed a fillet knife and ingredients to cook the fish, because it turns out Justin attended culinary school in New York. (Although apparently they don’t teach you how to use alcohol stoves in culinary school, as Justin set the record for the biggest flame on Elpis’ stove.) We went on what was possibly the fastest boat ride of my life, planing across the waves until we saw little Elpis with an exhausted-looking Grace and Lynn on board. While I had been traveling via plane and making new friends, Grace and Lynn had sailed overnight from Spanish Wells. They left in what they thought was plenty of time to arrive by my flight, but as Chartreuse (our engine) can be temperamental, they were left engineless and in lighter winds than forecasted. Grace had apparently spent hours taking apart and checking each part of the cooling system, finding nothing wrong. Finally, after hour six of still finding nothing wrong, she decided to let Chartreuse be and focus on sailing. About four hours later, Grace decided to try starting the engine again, just for kicks. Grace still can’t explain how or why, but the engine started immediately. Chartreuse had apparently decided she was ready to be helpful again.

It was one of those times where the Universe was working in a mysterious way. While it was stressful for Grace and Lynn to deal with an unidentifiable problem with the engine, and while I apparently was not quite as easy-breezy as I thought on shore (Later, Justin told Grace, “When we met Emily at the bar, she was panicking”), we ended up befriending Justin and Jay and having a week of adventures with them in the Abacos. It was another example of the kindness of strangers, something we’ve been learning over and over again on this boat trip.