Home is where the Anchor Is…Sailing the Exumas Day 6

Day Six Itinerary: Staniel Cay to Blackpoint Settlement (6 miles)

We enjoyed a peaceful morning at Big Major Spot. Maybe the rough patches were finally behind us and we’d have smooth sailing (pun intended) from this point forward.

It's funny how you never get up hope....

We all wanted to see the pigs again, so we took the dingy back to Pig Beach. We had heard from other cruisers that there were baby pigs. We had not seen them the previous day, so we were hoping they’d be out.

Who knows, maybe the baby pigs would be "adorable." Everything is cute as a baby.

We needed baby pigs!

I'm sorry. Even as babies, these pigs are not adorable. They just aren’t.

Okay, well, maybe this little guy was kind of cute in a "my nose is too big for my face and I have serious eye boogers" kind of way.

After the pigs, Matt and I took the dingy for a ride over to Sandy Cay. The water was simply ridiculous on the ride over. It looked unnatural.

When we reached Sandy Cay, a tiny uninhabited speck with an amazing beach, we had it all to ourselves. A sandbar was just beginning to form.

It was perfect.

We headed back to Island Girl in time to get back to Staniel Cay for low tide. The group wanted to snorkel the Grotto again and we needed to get fuel and ice at the marina. I was also still determined to find those hot dog buns.

I bet that Yacht Party had hot dog buns.

The short ride from Big Major Spot to the Staniel Cay Yacht Club was beautiful.

The first thing we learned at Staniel Cay was how not to dock a catamaran. As we neared the dock, Matt jumped off with the rope. Then there was a lot of shouting of random instructions. Matt, John, and Keith all started going in different directions. There was more shouting. The boat suddenly jerked into reverse. Matt was still holding the rope. Matt nearly lost an arm. Keith leapt off the helm. The boat was still in reverse. The rope went in the water. There was more shouting. More running. We finally got the boat in place. Matt regained consciousness, checked to see if he still had 2 arms, and picked himself up off the dock.

Success?

The guys focued on water and fuel and I walked back to the Blue and Pink Stores. Maybe some hot dog buns had materialized overnight.

No luck.

Apparently, finding hot dog buns in the Exumas is like spotting a unicorn.

We headed back over to Thunderball Grotto for another snorkel and to grill the leftover hamburgers and (bunless) hot dogs for lunch. It was as beautiful as it had been the day before.

The grill wouldn’t light. Despite my insistence that we could, indeed, cook hot dogs and hamburgers on the stove, the guys kept working on the grill.

Remember how I said a man will put a bike together wrong 4 times before he'll read the instructions? Yeah. It was something like that.

An hour later, looking at the tools strewn all about the deck, getting hot and hungry, I started yelling.

You know that person that is really bossy, always talks but never listens, has a really bad temper and is always starting fights?

Apparently, that’s me.

I cussed everyone out. Matt threw a few hamburgers in the ocean. Sydney got a headache. I started crying. John was just happy that he wasn’t the one fighting with me this time. Teresa just wished her mattress was dry so she could go hide in her cabin. Keith popped open a beer and wondered why the hell he was on a boat with these people.

After lunch (cooked on the stove) and a second round of snorkeling, we pulled up our anchor and headed toward Blackpoint Settlement on Great Guana Cay.

We stopped on Bitter Guana Cay, just before Blackpoint, to see the endangered Rock Iguanas.

Blackpoint Settlement is touted as the largest settlement in the Exuma cays. I think I expected it to be bigger, but I should have known better after George Town.

This time it was John & Matt who leapt off the boat before even getting a shower. They were headed to Scorpio’s Happier Hour where they could drink and play pool without any women glaring at them.

Teresa went in to town hoping to find some shops still open.

Sydney still had a headache and was sleeping in her cabin.

I grabbed a quick shower and had Keith take me to the settlement dock so I could find Teresa. He stayed with Sydney.

I found Teresa and she told me the guys were at Scorpio’s.

We headed that way and found a seat at the bar. The guys were playing pool. We ignored them. They ignored us. It was all very 7th grade.

Teresa and I found that Scorpio’s was still having what they called “Happier Hour.” This meant 2-for-1 rum punches. Since they were only $3.50 each, it seemed like a good idea to drink as many of them as we could, despite the fact that they could have stripped the paint off my house

I was feeling happier already.

After a few rum punches, we forgot to be mad.

Lessons Learned on Island Girl So Far:

1) Every morning is going to be sunny and fun.
2) Every afternoon one of three things is going to happen: a) Someone is going to get hurt. b) We are going to break something. c) Vicki is going to get in a fight with someone.
3) Every evening all the ills of the day can be cured with rum punch.
4) No one has proper bathroom signs.

See? We were getting the hang of it.

We walked down to Lorraine’s Café for dinner. While the pig feet and sheep tongue souse sounded mighty tasty, I went boring and got the ribs.
Not expecting much, I was surprised at just how good the ribs were. Although, it could have just been the rum punch. It made everything seem awesome.

For dessert, the waitress brought us a plate of the ugliest, but most delicious little cupcakes ever.

It was late. We stumbled down to the dock and suddenly realized we didn’t have a way to contact Keith and let him know we were ready for a pick up.

We yelled. We jumped up and down. We whistled. Finally, he came to get us and we made a bone-jarring, wet, and slow dingy ride back to the boat at oh-dark-hundred.