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Three female editors take over the helm
for a bareboat adventure.
By Eileen Mansfield — Spring
2004
“Sure,” was the speedy reply I got when I
asked Associate Editor Elizabeth (Liz) Ginns Britten if she wanted to
come along on a bareboat charter in the Abacos. Liz, a lifelong boater
and cruiser, jumped at the chance for a reprieve from the tough New York
winter we were having. Aimée Colon, our art director, was a different
story. She’d had no experience on boats and needed some convincing.
But finally, after showing her pictures of the islands and promising an
adventurous week with the girls, she gave in.
As enthusiastic as I was at first, I have to say that
in the weeks leading up to this trip, I worried every day about taking
out a 46-footer. My experience with boats is mostly limited to runabouts
on a lake in the Adirondacks, where a speedboat, two kayaks, and a canoe
are considered “traffic.” The anticipation of taking a big,
beamy power catamaran into an area I was unfamiliar with was nerve-wracking.
We arrived at NauticBlue’s Marsh Harbor office,
boarded our NauticBlue 464, Southern Comfort,
after a charter briefing, and agreed that Liz would be captain on day
one (while Aimée and I acted as deckhands and helped her navigate).
One look into Liz’s eyes suggested she was as jittery as I was. A
notoriously nervous person (I like to call her “quirky”), she
said she was imagining “us running aground and returning from the
trip unemployed.”
After a five-mile zigzag course across Abaco Sound (we
hadn’t yet discovered the rudder-angle indicator) and joking that
we were sure to have avoided any U-boats in the area, we arrived in Hope
Town Harbor on Elbow Cay and picked up a mooring without incident. Once
settled, we breathed a collective sigh of relief. Our nervousness became
distant memories after we each popped open a Presidente (a Dominican beer),
toasted ourselves for a job well-done, then sat back to enjoy the sunset,
listening to church bells chiming in the distance.
The next morning we were off to explore Hope Town and
the Elbow Reef Lighthouse, famous for its candy-cane stripes. The 101-step
climb to the top got our appetites going, so we decided to hunt down the
key lime pie at Vernon’s Grocery & Upper Crust Bakery, which
we’d read about in our Lonely Planet guidebook. After getting sidetracked
at a gift-shop, we asked for directions. The clerk told us, “Head
over to Back Street, and you’ll run right into it. But I wouldn’t
exactly call it a bakery.” Since there are only two main roads in
town, we found it easily enough. Vernon’s is a quaint grocery, decorated
with hundreds of signs saying things like, “If your draft exceeds
your depth, you are most assuredly aground.” But we agreed that the
two pies we found in a refrigerator do not constitute an “Upper Crust
Bakery.”
>> Next page >> Part 2: We moored
in Kidd’s Cove in Great Guyana Cay looking for a more serene anchorage
after our rough night and hooked up the barbeque for an early lunch. Page
1,
2, 3,
4
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