It
is 0630 hours on Let's Dance, the sun is just barely lighting the
eastern horizon and Captain Bill has already put in a shift or two.
The coffee is steaming and the single-sideband radio (SSB) crackles
and hums. Class is about to begin! Six mornings a week, Florida
rock star meteorologist Chris Parker takes over the SSB airwaves on
frequency 4045 MHz to interpret complex weather patterns for
interested skippers from the Bahamas to Central America.
We
are all slaves to the weather -- wind speed and gusts, cold fronts,
warm fronts, occluded fronts, barometric pressure, sea state -- we
watch for even the smallest change with rapt attention. And Chris
Parker is rarely wrong as he interprets and advises and warns. He
has hundreds of sponsors -- people who pay to receive personalized
weather forecasts. We try, whenever possible, to be anchored right
next to one of these people. Captain Bill even signed us up to have
call-in rights, at $25 a pop, for personalized advice. When asked
for his thoughts on our timetable for touring the Ragged Islands,
Chris was adamant -- possibly the worst front of the winter to date
looms. Wait a week!
An
island tour by car seemed just the ticket since boating was
ill-advised. We rented a car from Mike at the Island Breeze
Restaurant -- a blue car with over 200,000 miles, a low front right
tire and a missing wiper blade. We discovered that Long Island is,
in fact, long. Eighty miles of island with 100 miles of paved
road....the Queen's Highway, no less! More tourist attractions were
touted for the southern half of the island, so we took a right from
the parking lot and prepared for a day of land-lubbing.
Our
first stop was the Library/Community Center/Museum located in
Deadman's Cay. Nice name, huh? The museum was small but well
maintained and we learned a bit about local customs and lore. The
story is familiar -- once home to over 7,000 people, with salt
panning the major industry, the island now provides for only a few
thousand who fish and build boats and porch-sit.
Continuing
on, making sure to drive on the left, we pass through Mangrove Bush,
Pettys and Hamiltons on our way to Dean's Blue Hole. (As an aside,
these hamlets, although well marked on maps of the island, mainly
consist of one or two occupied, cinder-block houses surrounded by
four or five abandoned, roofless houses. There may be a small church
and graveyard or a tiny general store as well.)
The
sign at the corner for the turn-off to the blue hole reads, "Turtle
Cove, Private." The asphalt drive is worn through in spots and
weeds are growing up. Another real estate deal gone bad. Near the
Atlantic side of the island the road turns to sand and ends abruptly.
So, here we are, at the world famous "Dean's Blue Hole."
A
blue hole is a cave, or underwater sinkhole, and a rare wonder of
nature. Most contain both salt and fresh water and are characterized
by a center of dark, dark blue water with concentric circles of
lighter blues radiating outward as the water becomes shallower. At
663 feet, Dean's Blue Hole is the deepest blue hole in the world.
So,
what do you do with a very, very deep hole in the water? You dive
in, of course! And to make it interesting, you do it without air
tanks! Free diving is a unique sport practiced by a select few. One
of these is a cute girl named Ashley whom we met at Thompson Bay.
She holds a world record for free diving to 220 feet. Her husband,
Ren, hovers below the surface with SCUBA gear to act as her safety
net should her breath give out too soon. Talk about trust!
To
facilitate the singular sport of free diving, a floating platform is
installed in the center of the circular cove. A heavy plumb line is
attached to the platform and hangs straight down into the depths. If
a competitor wants to dive to 150 feet, for example, he has a SCUBA
diver attach a metal tag to the underwater line at that depth. The
retrieved tag provides proof of the depth of the dive and the plumb
line keeps the diver from getting off course and wasting valuable
air. We watched from the shore as an Australian diver prepared for a
practice run by meditating and thinking happy thoughts while resting
on the floating platform. When ready, he pulled on a large, single
fin that gave a nice mermaid effect, then held his breath and hooked
onto the long line for his descent. Once he was in the water the
show ended, at least for us. Free diving is not a spectator sport.
From
Dean's we continued south down the highway, dodging the occasional
herd of sheep or goats. We stopped for lunch at the Outer Edge Grill
at the Flying Fish Marina in Clarencetown. Loved the signage as you
drive into this tiny settlement:
There
are so many churches on Long Island that we wondered if their were
enough priests to fill them on Sunday mornings. A few churches are
small Pentecostal or Baptist churches, but most are either Catholic
or Anglican. A Father Jerome, born in Britain in 1876, studied
architecture before becoming an Anglican priest. His ministry led
him to the Bahamas where he reportedly built many of the island
churches by hand with locally quarried stones. Amazing!
Our
last stop on the Long Island self-guided tour was the company town of
Hard Bargain. True! Thousands were employed by the Diamond Crystal
Salt Pans until the 1970s when the Bahamas became independent from
Great Britain. At that time, the new Bahamian government thought
they'd renegotiate the terms of many foreign business contracts. The
Diamond Crystal company didn't like the new arrangement and literally
walked away from their investment. They left the dredging machinery,
processing equipment, office buildings, employee housing and shipping
facilities. We don't know if Hard Bargain got its name before or
after the exodus.
A
hapless tugboat was left tied to a dock and, as the years passed, the
bay silted in and left the tug permanently mired in sand.
We
were warned to tour the salt pan area in daylight, as finding the
route out could be problematic after dark. No kidding! The roads
were rutted tracks that intersected at odd angles and were marked by
identical, scruffy shrubs at every corner. We made several wrong
turns before finding the overgrown runway that served as our escape
route. The Queen's Highway continued southward for another few miles
to end at Gordons and the Crooked Island Passage. We decided to head
back north, however, as skies were clouding up and the windshield
wipers looked inadequate.
The
rain caught us before we got back to the Island Breeze and the dinghy
ride across Thompson Bay to Let's Dance was rockin'. Great weather
reporting, Chris!
Let's
Dance.....Carol and Bill
