Our original plan for today was to head a few miles further south to Cave Cay to snorkel and do some exploring, but the day started out overcast and was expected to remain so, making underwater visibility poor. So instead, we decided to turn around and start our journey back north, our first stop being BlackPoint Settlement on Great Guana Cay.
BlackPoint is a large settlement by Bahamas standards and, for our purposes, notable for two things: Ida’s laundry (expensive, but excellent) and Lorraine’s Café (best cracked conch in the Exumas).
With those two objectives in mind, we hauled anchor and headed north, arriving at BlackPoint around noon. After an on-board lunch, we loaded up the dinghy with the laundry and spent the afternoon washing, drying, folding and repackaging 5 sacks of sheets, shirts, bathing suits, underwear and the like we had accumulated over the previous few weeks. We then went back to the boat to spend a quiet evening, figuring we’d take a walk, have lunch at Lorraine’s and then move further north the next day.
Of course, plans always change – our quiet evening was interrupted by Redbone, a huge jovial Bahamian who circled our boat with his at about 9:30 pm calling out for some help. There was no room at the Government Dock for his boat, so he asked us to follow him to a mooring in our dinghy and then take him to shore. I told him I’d be happy to help out and moments later was off in our dinghy to give him the ride in.
Next morning, we dinghied into BlackPoint around mid-morning, figuring we’d take a walk, have an early lunch at Lorraine’s (got to have some of that cracked conch) and then move the boat further north afterwards. One problem – it was Sunday, Lorraine was at church and the minister for today was special, brought in from Nassau. Needless to say, we knew none of this. We had a nice walk and arrived at Lorraine’s around 11:30 and initially told she should be back in “about 20 minutes”. Well, the Nassau minister had different plans; we could hear the singing from the Baptist Church just a house or two down the street; and it went on and on. We sat in Lorraine’s for a while, took a second walk and eventually (around 2pm) finally got served our lunch – it was worth the long “Island Time” wait.
After lunch we went back to the boat and moved it about 7 miles further North to Big Major Cay – this would position us nicely to take a big hop tomorrow up to Shroud Cay, at the top of the Bahamas National Underwater Park headquartered at Warderick Wells.
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| The BlackPoint Government Building |
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| Saturday afternoon fun for the kids |
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| BlackPoint Highlights: Lorraine’s is listed; Ida’s is not |
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| Redbone’s mooring was in here; the mooring field is very different at night |
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| Laundry Day |
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| On our walkabout |
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| The sign pointed to a path to a blow hole – it was wimpy, not much spray came out |
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| Spring in the Bahamas: flowers everywhere you look |
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| More spring color |
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