Hazard to Navigation

We are in the midst of hauling, packing and throwing away 12 years of living on Agur's Wish. It is poignant but also very rewarding to look back and know we lived all of this. Found this old article for all of you that said we never left the Abacos.

The voices on the VHF were foreign to us. Their melodious tones exotic. Who did they belong to? We were thrilled and excited but also a little afraid. We were in a foreign land for the first time and although the voices were strange to us, in fact we were the strangers. What would we find here. There was so much we didn’t know.
That was over a year ago and we’ve discovered it’s not actually docklines that you keep you tied to one place, it’s heartlines. This unwillingness to leave our friends and loved ones and the comfort of the familiar doesn’t just happen before you start cruising, it can happen at the beginning, in the middle, and finally at the end.

We cleared into the Abacos December 24, 2003. Almost a year and a half later we were still there. What happened? You might say a sort of metamorphosis took place. We came in as cruisers and at first we bonded only with other cruisers. We visited each other’s boats and shared happy hours that lasted long past the happy hour. We traveled in bands to the bars, the grocery stores and the laundry mats. We were our own community and other than to spend a little money we didn’t really have to interact with the local community.

After a few weeks we gathered to plan the next leg of our journey south. Our first going away party was in February of 2004 when a friend of ours who was a former cruiser and now was a local took us out for lunch. Steve had already fallen into the same trap we were about to find ourselves caught in and I think we can lay most of the fault at his door. We had met Steve and his former girlfriend while waiting out a storm on the ICW in North Carolina. As I remember, they were headed to the Virgin Islands. Imagine our surprise when we cruised into the Abacos five years later and heard their boat’s call sign, “Who Cares”, on the VHF. It seems they had sailed in and never left. They had become locals and they knew lots of other locals. Most importantly they knew the right kind of locals, the ones who own bars and the ones who patronize bars and they were happy to introduce us to them, for a dollar apiece. Obviously, Steve didn't value their friendship that much.

I had always told the captain that when I retired I wanted to be like Norm on the TV show Cheers and find a place where everybody knew my name. It looked as if I’d found it. We stepped out of our circle of cruising friends and rubbed elbows with the locals and when our cruising friends moved on, we stayed put.

Through out that spring and summer new waves of cruisers washed into the Abacos and we took them under our wing. They were in awe of our impressive stores of knowledge such as where to go for “two-fer” happy hours and who had the best free appetizers. But they all managed to move on while we stayed put.

About this time we were getting a little bored with just partying all the time (hard to believe, but true) so we began to look for something else to fill our time. Opportunities to volunteer abound in the islands. Whether it’s manning the desk at a museum or library or picking up a paintbrush or hammer at one of the schools or churches, if you let someone know you’re willing, they will put you to work. Volunteering opened up a whole new branch of people for us to get attached to.

Probably, the event that was most instrumental to us growing a reef on our hull, was when the captain volunteered to help anchor the Abaco Cruiser’s Net. Many cruising communities have cruising nets but, thanks to Patty Toler the organizer of the Abaco Cruisers Net almost fifteen years ago and the head honcho in charge, the Abaco Cruisers Net is one of the best organized and most entertaining ones around. It has been the model on which many other nets have been based. In Abacos, the net is the foundation of the day for most cruisers and many locals.

I remember way back when we first arrived, the Abaco Cruiser’s Net “anchor-people” held a sort of fascination for us and our band of cruisers. We all wanted to put faces to those voices that ruled our world every morning. Now Jeff had joined this brotherhood of "rich and famous radio personalties" and our lives in the Abacos were forever changed. You must keep in mind that most cruisers have limited media access so we’re pretty desperate for entertainment(Keep in mind, I wrote this back in the dark ages of 2004). Dinghys would pull along side our boat, usually when we were in our skivvies, and say they just wanted meet the man behind the voice. They usually regretted it. Restaurant and bar owners that advertised on the net treated us with a little more respect than when we were just sailor-trash bar bums there to gobble up their free appetizers, although we really hadn’t changed all that much. We still could never get a free drink, though and they still sat us in the corner of the dining room if we were wearing our cleanest dirty shirts. Once again, we were becoming more and more enmeshed.

Then the forces of nature turned against us. Summer had crept up on us bringing hurricane season with it. We were supposed to be so much further down the islands. We convinced ourselves that it was better this way. At least we knew people and we had resources. So again we stayed put.

The summer wave of cruisers came in and we welcomed them but they were an established pack and we weren’t able to infiltrate their ranks very deeply. That was okay because we were getting tired and we had our own pack. When they moved on and we waved good-bye it was with a weary relieved feeling that we shared with the locals. “Ahh! We’ve finally got the place to ourselves.” The population of boaters fell to a brave or perhaps foolhardy few.

Then Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne blew in and our brave little band of boats banded together to secure ourselves and our boats. We went to shelters or the homes of kind strangers and friends. We weathered the storms but emerged to find our adopted community ravaged. It was time to repay a part of the debt we owed.

November rolled around and more familiar voices returned to the radio. Our cruising friends were coming back. We couldn’t leave now. So, again we stayed put.

By now nobody believed we would actually leave and we were the butt of more than a few jokes. Of course, the attendance at our going-away parties didn’t drop off. Cruisers love any reason to party. And there’s always a reason. Christmas, New Years, Superbowl, Groundhog Day, Whit Monday, Full Moons and we stayed for each of them again.

Finally our cruising friends were already planning their return trips to the states when we decided we had to go. We couldn’t wait around another year for them to return. So one early morning, without fanfare, we slipped away.
And now….
The voices on the VHF are foreign to us. Their melodious tones exotic. Who do they belong to? We’re thrilled and excited but also a little afraid.


P.S. I think this is somewhat appropo for what our future holds

P.P.S. In full reporter's honesty, we only stayed away for 6 weeks. We were in rehab in Spanish Wells just to let our livers recover (Spanish Wells is dry but you can dinghy across the harbour to the liquor store and we heard there is a lady there that sells it out her back door) and when the propagation was good we could call into the cruisers net just to let them know we were safe and still around.