April 27-May 1

Once we arrived at Long Island (in the Bahamas), we scooped into the harbor and set anchor among just a few other boats.  It seemed beautiful to me in a windswept and wild kind of way.  The harbor was rough and we could see the waves coming over the reef in huge breakers up ahead.  In the Caribbean, we were used to land-locked harbors or at least harbors in the lee of the island.  We did not anchor so close to huge breakers.  The worst we experienced was heavy swells.  The Bahamas are reef islands and harbors are sometimes created by a little land to one side and a reef on the other.  The reef, lying just under the water, halts the ocean waves.  But as you sit on the deck of your boat, watching the waves crash over this unseen wall of coral, you hope that it really and truly is going to protect you from that huge and powerful sea.

We felt like we had left civilization behind.  Long Island is, well, long.  It has a strong population of 3,000 residents.  Originally called Yuma, by the Arawaks, it was renamed Fernandina by Christopher Columbus.  This was reportedly his third stop on his first voyage in 1492.  It seemed to us that every island in the Bahamas was laying claim that it was the first something-or-other on one of Columbus’ voyages.  We were starting to doubt any of these claims.  But Wikipedia agrees, so who are we to judge?  The first settlers after the Arawaks and Lucayan Indians were Loyalists from New Jersey and New England, who fled America after the Revolution.  Later, settlers came from the Carolinas to plant cotton.  Many of the current islanders descend from those original families.  As we met people, we tried in vain to place their accent.  It sounded vaguely familiar.  We eventually realized that it was the accent that you hear in movies about America in the 1700’s.  Like a southern farmer with a vaguely British background.  (Here ends the history lesson.)

This part of the island felt isolated and remote.  We were inspired to slow down, look around us, and explore.  Just a little.  We still needed some time to unwind after so much sailing in the last week.  The kids kayaked over to the outer island and played on the beach.  The men took the dinghies on a long ride into Clarence Town to check out the marina (and the availability of lures and other fishing gear.)

Wendy and Craig’s friends had been to Long Island and had suggested that we find Dean’s Blue Hole.  None of us had a deep understanding of blue holes (get it?  You will.) but we knew that it was an area of the sea floor that dropped suddenly in depth.  This blue hole was the deepest in the world.  It supposedly drops suddenly from 6 inches to 663 feet deep.  In April 2010, William Trubridge broke a free-diving world record in the blue hole reaching a depth of 302 ft without the use of fins.  That sounded crazy cool.

We loaded up our snorkel gear and took the dinghies to the spot we thought it would be based on the charts.  The harbor had many shallow areas that threatened to ground even our dinghies, so we slowly picked our way across the bay to the beach.  The beach was beautiful, but we had Dean’s Blue Hole as our one and only goal.  We dragged our gear down the beach, across some flats, and decided that we might have found it!  The kids waded tentatively while I snorkeled out to the middle of this pool of water, only to discover that it went from a depth of 2 feet at the edges to a staggering 2 ½ feet in the middle.  Nope.  That’s not it.

We walked back toward the beach and decided that a certain spot near the west end of the harbor looked a bit darker than the rest of the water.  Since water is darker when it is deeper, we thought this must be Dean’s Blue Hole.  In we went.  Very promising.  The sea floor dropped off sharply about ten feet in from the edge.  Suddenly, the water temperature dropped significantly!  This is another sign of deep water.

Wendy remembered the photo her friends had posted on their website and knew that there was a buoy in the center of the blue hole where the professional free divers practiced their daredevil sport.  “Oh look!” cried Wendy.  “A buoy!”  We all started to swim out to the buoy but we had to come to the realization that Dean’s Blue Imposter #2 was not the hole we were looking for either.  It didn’t drop off significantly and the buoy was just a regular old mooring ball.  I snuck a look at Wendy and got a little scared.  She was starting to get a wild look in her eyes that seemed to say, “I’ll get you, Dean!  And your little Blue Hole, too!”

We decided, after poring over the charts, that Dean’s Blue Hole was further north than the harbor where we had anchored.  So we rented a car.  You would too, right?  I mean, at that point we were pretty much ensnared in the whole Blue Hole mess.  I was thinking to myself, “This thing better be good.”  I didn’t want to think about what Wendy was thinking.

We drove north, Craig driving on the left side of the road, from the right side of the car.  I was navigating, using a cartoon map in a “Welcome to Long Island” brochure, which was NOT drawn to scale, had a giant fish swimming through the middle of the island, and made me feel just a little suspicious about its thoroughness.  But then we passed a town that was in real life as well as on the map!

Amidst jovial discussions in the car (and if you have ever driven with six kids in a car, you know that “jovial” and “discussions” are used loosely and generously here.),

I saw a sign in the woods that said, “DEAN’S, 2 miles.”  Aha!  Dean is the name of a town!  Now we get it.  We kept our eyes peeled for more signs and made a sharp right onto a road that soon turned into a dirt road, that soon failed to give us any further clues.  We finally got to a dirt road intersection with signs warning of all kinds of calamities.  Deep in the weeds on the far corner, was a sign on the ground that said, “Dean’s Blue Hole”.  The arrow on the sign was of no help, because the sign was askew and seemed to point slightly toward the sky and yet also into the thicket, which was away from the water.  But we figured it out, whooping all the way, and piled out of the car, tearing off towards the water.

As we rounded the corner, there was no more doubt in our minds.  This was definitely it.  To the left, the white sand of the beach led to a circular area of water surrounded on three sides by steep cliffs.  The water was clear at the edges of the circle, stunningly turquoise two feet in from that, and the deepest, darkest navy blue in the center.

We swam towards the middle, held onto the rope that plunged into the depths, and all tried to dive as deep as we could.  We fell slightly short of the 302′ record.  We snorkeled around the edges of the circular pool and saw tiny sergeant majors, a little school of baby squid, who stared at us with their giant eyes, and many other fish.  Wendy and some of the kids dared to jump off the high cliffs.  I don’t know how they can do it!

 

After fulfilling what had become our main goal in life, we were famished.  We stopped at Max’s Conch Bar and felt the cool vibe right away.  The kids went off to find a table in the garden while the four adults snagged seats at the bar.

A few hours, and a lot of conch later, we headed back to sleepy Clarence Town.  On the spur of the moment, we decided to climb the twin towers of the church.  We were met with stunning views, both of the village, the harbor, and each other!

 

 

We had the rental car for 24 hours, so we decided to push our luck a bit further and seek out Mr. Cartright, to see if we could get a tour of his family’s caves.  The Hamilton Caves were used for centuries by the native indians of the island.  Later, settlers used the caves as shelter during hurricanes.  Remains had been discovered, as well as artifacts, sculptures, and rock etchings.  For years, bat dung was collected and used for fertilizer.

What’s that?  I didn’t mention there would be bats?  Oh yes I did.  Check the title of this post.  Some of you are probably saying, “Cool!”  Some of you are not.  I discovered that I belong in the latter group, while everyone else on Patronus and Anything Goes belongs in the former group.  I didn’t realize that I was afraid of bats.  Actually, I’m not much afraid of anything, in the physical world at least.  I have some conceptual fears, like being hit by a Mack truck.  But nothing like spiders or lightning or sharks.  Or lions or tigers or bears, for that matter (I seriously did not intend on making two Wizard of Oz allusions in one post.  It just came out.)

We were led into the caves by our guide- flashlights and headlamps lighting the way.  I took up my usual role of picture-taker, question-asker, and kid-engager.  As we picked our way through the darkness, looking at stalactites and stalagmites, I was enjoying the curious silence, the soft, mossy ground, and the sacred aura of this place that had been home to an ancient people.

 

Then Mr. Caveman says, “Over here, we have one of 10 species of bats found in these caves.” (It might have been 8 species.  Or 90.  I pretty much forgot everything he had said earlier after I heard the word “bat”.)  He shined his light toward the ceiling and said, “They don’t really like this, so don’t shine your flashlights on them.”  Um.  They don’t “like” this?  THEN WHY ARE YOU DOING IT????  ARE YOU TRYING TO PISS OFF THE BATS????

I looked up and saw them, just hanging there, staring at us with their spooky, upside down faces.  I heard the squeaky clicking sounds they make and recognized it from the bat cave in St. Lucia.  But in St. Lucia, the bats were in the cave and we were outside in the water.  These bats were 9 feet above my head.  I scanned the crowd and noted, with horror, that I was the tallest one in the group, along with Chris (who will claim that he is ¼ inch taller than me, but I’m pretty sure the bats would prefer my wild nest of boathead hair to his baseball-capped crew cut one.)

I immediately adopted a sort of squat/walk gait, accompanied by a paranoid head swivel that threatened to bring my old whiplash injury out of hiding.  The tour guide told me that these tactics were not necessary.  Like I’m going to believe him.

I realized that I had a bona fide fear emerging and was fascinated by it while at the same time just about paralyzed.  I knew that I had to keep it together so that the kids wouldn’t feel afraid.  But I couldn’t bring myself to stand up straight and my crazy head spinning wouldn’t stop.  It didn’t take long for my super-sleuth kids to realize that mom was getting a bit unhinged.  I felt anxious but could hear the tinny sounds of rational thought in the back of my head saying, “They wouldn’t do tours if there was a real danger.  We would have had to sign a waiver.  They wouldn’t be able to get insurance.  Too many people would sue them!”  And then I remembered that we were in the Bahamas.  That kind of organized American safety was not, like, here.  If you were dumb enough to take a tour of a cave in the Bahamas, it was your own damn fault if you got attacked by bats.  It’s survival of the fittest out here.

I decided that this line of thinking wasn’t really helping.  By now I was missing out on all the fun bat facts that the Crazy Caveman was sharing with the group.  I was literally walking while hiding my head between Chris’ arm and the backpack he was wearing.  If he wandered off, I would create a safe zone between Wendy and the nearest kid and duck into it.  Whenever I heard one of the kids yell, “There’s some!” and point at a group of bats flying low through the cave, I would just about curl into a ball.  If the ground wasn’t covered with bat droppings, I just might have hit the deck.

I was really trying to hold it together and I was embarrassed about making such a scene.  I really couldn’t help it.  I wasn’t being funny or dramatic or acting like a diva.  I was in a real panic about these bats.  What made it a true fear is that I couldn’t even put my finger on what it was I was afraid of.  I guess I didn’t want them flying at me and getting tangled in my hair and then clawing at my face as they tried to get unstuck (although that’s getting pretty specific).  But when I put a hat on, my fear didn’t go away.  I didn’t want to touch one either, but none had come close to any of us, so that didn’t seem likely either.

Somehow, the cave tour ended.  When I think back on it now, 3 months later, it seems like we were in that cave for 7 hours.  I am disappointed that I missed out on a chance to learn more about the native people of Long Island and the archaeological information they have discovered in the caves so far.  But I am so glad that the rest of the group had a great time and even gladder that we didn’t encounter bats for the remainder of our voyage!

The only bad thing about leaving Long Island is that we were officially leaving the tropics.  The Tropic of Cancer lies across Long Island.  It was a sad, sad day on our boats, knowing that we are yet another official step closer back to civilization…