James Bond and the Sargent Majors

With another northerly on its way, we decided to sail south to Staniel Cay to get in a protected anchorage. We left Cambridge at the gentlemanly hour of 1:00 pm and had a spirited sail on the Atlantic side of the Exumas down to Staniel Cay. Since both Cambridge and Staniel have easy ocean side entrances it made more sense to just tough it out for a couple hours in the southerly wind rather than taking the much longer inside passage down Exuma Banks. We anchored right behind the famous Thunderball Grotto, a well protected area but one with 4-5 knots of current running though it. With that much current and wind, anchoring was one of those "let's guess where everyone else's anchors are and drop ours in the middle." As the current shifted you got to know your neighbors very well, despite their glaring looks.

We spent Saturday putting on the 8th and last coat of varnish (which was interesting considering the 5- knot current that kept sweeping me, the dingy, and the varnish brush away from the boat with every stroke). After that we went through the ritual of preparing the boat for guests, which means moving the bikes off the guest berth and up on the deck, luggage to the aft berth, and rearranging all the other miscellaneous stuff that ends up on the guest bed. We then went into town (a misnomer since there are only a handful of stores at best) to the Isles Store to get our laundry done, but she said she wouldn't be doing another load until next week. We then literally went door-to-door to find someone, eventually ending up at the yellow house (bakery) initially she said she'd do it for $20, only to be charged $40 (for two loads) by another woman when we came to pick it up. Such is island life. A couple of $4 beers at the Staniel Cay Yacht Club tempered our mood for the rest of the day.

On Sunday we again took the dingy up the shallow creek to Isles General Store, walked across the bridge and turned right to enter "Staniel Cay International Airport," which is essentially a hut next to the tarmac runway. Along with various locals and others waiting for small planes to take them to primarily Nassau, we watched each plane that landed to see if that was the Watermaker Airways flight from Ft. Lauderdale.

Security is tight here at the Staniel Cay International Airport.

Finally, the 10-place plane landed and Jim and Mary Ann bound down the steps with big smiles on their faces. Jim used to crew on Phoenix, my 26-ft. Thunderbird that we raced for about 15 years. He's a great sailor and a brilliant tactician, a skill I was sorely lacking. We have known them for over 35 years and this was a great chance to get reacquainted. I'm sure they were amazed when we walked down the short dirt road and hopped in the dingy for the ride back to the boat, not your typical "airport arrival" scenario.

I kidded Meryl about her telling Mary Ann that we were going into the "yacht club" for dinner and Mary Ann worrying about what to wear for such an auspicious dining experience.

Staniel Cay Yacht Club. Very posh.

My comment that "you would be over dressed in shorts and a t-shirt" fell on deaf ears. Anyway we had a great dinner and opportunity to get caught up on each other's lives.

On Monday morning we headed back into Staniel Cay to the local BaTelCo office to try and get our cell phones hooked up to the Bahamian phone system. Trying to describe this adventure is worth multiple blog entries, but after an hour and $107 my iPhone still wasn't getting emails. We experimented a little and got some advice from a local techie (even after you are signed up, paid your money, and are entered into the BatelCo computer system you still need to send a message into BatelCo's system to "activate" your service). Naturally the nice BatelCo lady didn't know anything about this.

We then made the rounds of the yellow house (bakery) for wheat and coconut bread, the blue house (the local grocery store) for eggs and other food items (the one thing we needed was milk but it typically sells out the day the delivery boat [Wed] arrives), and the pink house (another small grocery). All of this certainly gave Jim and Mary Ann a taste of what island life is like and how hard it is to get anything done. After packing all the groceries away on the boat, Jim, Meryl and I took a short dingy ride over to Thunderball Grotto, located on an small island just west of where we were anchored. The cave was featured briefly in the James Bond film, Thunderball. We tried to anchor just outside the cave but the mini Danforth anchor for the dingy couldn't get a bite on the hard limestone bottom. Jim finally dove down and built a little mound with rocks on top of the anchor to hold it.

Entrance to Thunderball Grotto through a narrow passage in the rocks.

You enter the grotto through a small, hidden opening that shows up at low tide. After a sharp right turn your breath is taken away by the high-domed ceiling with the shafts of light piecing the gin-clear water.

The next sensory overload is schools of Sargent Majors and other tropical fish jetting towards you in search of food. I finally had my underwater camera working and got some great shots of Jim and Meryl swimming though various underwater openings in the cave and cruising along the outside walls of the island.

The Staniel Cay area is very popular with the Hollywood set and you never know whom you'll run into at popular locations like the grotto. One of our friends a couple weeks before literally bumped into comedian Bill Engvall while snorkeling in the cave. Steven Spielberg's yacht Seven Seas was here last year when we visited Staniel Cay and John Cusak, one of my favorite actors, managed to get himself blackballed from the area's SCUBA diving service (long story). Interesting place.