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By David Allester
This past spring my wife Eileen and I fled George Town, in the south-central Bahamas, soon after its annual cruising regatta had ended, desperate for some peaceful isolation. Regatta is a lot of fun, but sharing it with close to a thousand cruisers can be a bit intense. Two days later, we arrived on our 36 foot sailboat "Little Gidding" at Water Cay at the north end of the Jumentos archipelago. We discovered, to our dismay, that cruisers on ten other boats had preceded us. What were they doing there, spoiling our promise of blis
sful solitude? Four years ago, we had sailed the entire length of the island chain -- over a hundred miles -- and in two weeks hadn't encountered ten foreign boats. Although not yet in danger of being overrun with visitors, the Jumentos are gradually being "discovered" by the cruising community.
The islands closest to George Town -- Water Cay and Flamingo Cay -- are frequented the most by transient boaters. The majority of visitors wait until the worst of the winter cold fronts are over before going there. A lack of services and the absence of any all-weather anchorages discourage many cruisers from proceeding further down the line. By the time one reaches Ragged Island, the only inhabited island in the entire chain, the cruising crowd is pretty sparse, even now. And Ragged Island is definitely the end of the line. With nothing but the deep blue water of the Old Bahama Channel stretching to the south, it seems like the world ends there. And for all of the attention that they get from the government in Nassau, the 80 residents of this small outpost sometimes feel they've actually fallen off the edge.
The Jumentos have not always been a forgotten place. On some of the islands, overgrown stone walls, collapsed buildings, and feral goats are evidence of past attempts to settle the bleak wilderness. Up until the 1950's, Duncan Town on Ragged Island was an official port of entry, had a full time commissioner, and traded salt with Cuba and Haiti; its population peaked at around 500. Trade with Cuba ended after Fidel Castro came to power, the port lost its official designation, and the entrance channel began to silt in.
Now the salt flats extending below the town lie idle, no longer used for commercial purposes. Many of the houses are abandoned. Twelve children attend the one-room elementary school. Older kids go to Nassau for high school. Most don't return; they constitute the island's missing generation. Continued population decline seems inevitable.
When we were checking our e-mail at the telephone office, we asked the friendly worker Leander Maycock about the changes she'd seen on the island since being born there 50 years ago. "Losing the commissioner and our port status was a big blow, everything started to decline after that," Leander explained. "Now the local administrator comes in one day a month to do official business. But our biggest problem is the channel not being dredged. The weekly mail boat anchors off and we have to take our own boats out to it to get our supplies. We're paying the mail boat for dock to dock service, but there's no dock!" Building supplies in particular are difficult to bring in; in our walking tour of the town we passed several half completed structures that were on hold pending another shipment of lumber or cement.
We had walked a mile into town from where we had beached the dinghy on the island's south bay and hadn't met a single vehicle. On our trek back, we crested a hill to find a battered pick up truck bouncing towards us. It shuddered to a stop. The driver seemed as surprised to see a couple of strangers on the road as we were to see him. "You guys must be from one of the boats anchored in the bay," he said. "I'm Percy Wilson; why don't you visit my place on the beach tomorrow morning and I'll show you around?"
When we went ashore after breakfast the next morning, Percy was waiting for us under the casuarina trees on the beach. We pulled the dinghy up beside two derelict wooden fishing boats. Hidden from view by the trees were two structures: one didn't have a roof and the other, believe it or not, had an airplane for a roof! Percy explained that he used to operate a beach resort, but a fire had seriously damaged the main building. He's now rebuilt its interior and only has the roof left to replace. Eventually, he'd like to add five more rooms. The other building is the Eagle's Nest bar, closed for now because it's being used to store the materials required to reconstruct the beach house. We asked the obvious question: How did the plane get on the bar's roof?
"It's a DC3 that overshot the island's airstrip and landed in the marsh at the end. I got the salvage contract to clear it out of the way. I asked if I could keep the plane, the administrator agreed, and I hauled it over here by propping the nose on top of my truck and carrying the tail in the bucket of a back-hoe. I had to take the wings off to get it between the trees." He's hoping he can buy some old seats at an auction and figures it'll be a big attraction once he's installed a couple of video games in the cockpit.
Percy also owns Jamaica Cay, a small island 35 miles to the north. He's got even bigger plans for its future: several tourist cottages, a restaurant, bar, gift shop, two swimming pools, tennis courts, and a mini golf course. "I'm looking to create a nudist
colony type environment aimed at the high end market." He admitted it's taken some time to develop the site, but said he hopes the first phase will open soon. "Getting building materials down here is a real challenge, but I'm getting there.
"We confessed we were a bit puzzled by Percy's ambitious plans given the sense of abandonment that seems to permeate the islands. He immediately brightened up. "This area has a great future. We have two of the best legal businesses possible, fishing and tourism. A fisherman can make $100,000 a year here. We're at the gateway to Cuba, it's only 60 miles away. When Cuba opens up, there will be all kinds of boat traffic through here. All we have to do is build the facilities and people will stop. I tell the other islanders that's what they should be doing with their money."
We looked at the roofless beach house, the bar with a slightly crunched airplane on top of it, and the beached fishing boats. The mile wide bay was empty except for "Little Gidding" and "Mars", a French sailboat with a young couple and their two sons on board. We had planned to leave for Cuba that night in order to make our landfall at Puerto de Vita, the nearest port of entry, in the morning light. "Mars" was going to follow as soon as they got a weather window that would take them all the way to Havana. We tried to imagine another George Town on Ragged Island. I turned to Percy. "We'll have a couple of cold beer at the Eagle's Nest the next time we come through," I promised.
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