Farmer's Cay

Our plans changed a little bit because of the wind direction on Tuesday.  We were planning to drop off the Asbell’s at Black Point and stay there a night or 2, to walk into the settlement and to do some light provisioning, but the winds turned to be from the west.  The Black Point cove didn’t provide us any protection with that wind direction.  Instead we decided to advance down to Farmer’s Cay.  

Farmer’s Cay is an extremely small settlement that has roughly 60 residents.  We have observed in the past couple of days, most cruisers (like ourselves) really don’t advance past Staniel Cay (where the pigs are).  After Staniel Cay, the traffic and the amount of boats significantly decreased.

We booked ourselves into the Farmer’s Cay Yacht Club for a couple of nights.  As you can see by the picture below, we were a club of 2.  Our vessels occupied the club’s docks.

We went to the “club” for lunch and enjoyed cracked conch and whole fried snapper for lunch with our new friend Roosevelt Nixon (not kidding).  He is a 4^th generation Nixon who owns this island/settlement with his family.  He couldn’t have been any nicer.  We talked about the settlement, politics, the Bahamas, and his general take on life.  We invited him for coffee the next morning, for which he obliged. 

Since the local baker (Nancy) was out of flour, he offered to make us a couple of loaf's of bread and a carrot cake for Russell's birthday.  Wow, was it good.

We enjoyed sunset from the dock before heading to dinner.

We went to dinner that night at Ty’s Bar and Grill.  Once again, we were the only people in the restaurant.  We were picked up by Captain Harvey after sunset and driven in a golf cart down the airstrip to the restaurant.  The mosquitoes were out in force, with backups.  The kids played with some local kids during dinner, we drank rum punch, fought off the mosquitoes, and had dinner (in the company of the mosquitoes).  The cook and Harvey couldn’t have been nicer despite the mosquitoes, warm restaurant, and our 1.5 hour wait for food (considering we pre-ordered our meals earlier in the day).  We are fairly sure they didn’t have the supplies for our dinner and had to provision from another source OR go out and catch our dinner.

The next day, we spent some time catching up on boat chores and planned (mapped out) our next several days.  We then headed into “town”.  The mail boat had not come to the island in almost 2 weeks.  The shelves of the markets were bare.  We walked around for about 30 minutes and returned back to the boats to go fishing.  Before we left, Dan and I stopped by a local fishing boat, where we purchased 4 conchs to make conch salad for appetizers later.

We headed out, with all 6 of us in tow and went fishing on the dingies.  Boy, did we miss the Boston Whaler.  Dan, once again was in the water, helping direct fishing traffic, while the rest of us where on the dinghies (tied together) fishing.  We came away with 8 snappers and 1 smaller grouper.  Of course, we left the fish scaling tool on the Boston Whaler, so Vicky was scaling the fish with a potato peeler, while I cleaned the fish on the back of Summer Chaser.  Surprisingly, the peeler worked well (used the peeler upside down).

Vicky and I prepared the conch salad (2 ways – scorched and regular) and made roasted fish and potatoes for dinner. 

We are headed south on Thursday to another island – TBD.