Junkanoo!

After enjoying several lovely days in Hope Town, we backtracked to Marsh Harbor for the Junkanoo event. According to the Bahamian government website, a Junkanoo is a Bahamian national festival with roots that can be traced to West Africa. Participating teams spend months working on a theme, developing costumes, musical compositions, and choreography. Judges roam throughout the groups, scoring them on a page-long list of categories. The Marsh Harbor Junkanoo is on a much smaller scale than the annual event held in Nassau on Boxing Day, but we still very much wanted to see it.

The posters in town said that the Juniors event would be held at 6:00 on Friday, with the Adults the following night at 7:00. So being typical Americans from the northeast, we showed up slightly before 6:00 on Friday evening. This being the islands, the fencing was just going up when we arrived. Looks like we were a little early!

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Moving into the southern Abacos.

On Friday the weather had calmed down and we saw a good opportunity to go through the Whale on Saturday, so we said goodbye to our hidey hole for a welcome change of scenery.

The plan was to anchor at No Name Cay for the day and night, but as we approached I looked over and was entranced by the beach on the southern end of Green Turtle Cay near Gilliam Bay. Jeff asked if I wanted to go there instead, but I said that we had already decided on No Name so we stayed the course. I couldn’t stop looking over at the other beach though, which really did look much nicer, so we made a U turn and anchored by the prettier beach instead.

We had the anchorage all to ourselves, and it was lovely.

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Our introduction to the Abacos.

After a good night’s sleep at Great Sale Cay, we shoved off again bright and early for Green Turtle Cay where we planned to check in with immigration and customs. After getting our obligatory “rip roaring argument stemming from not putting the sails up in a long time so we’re rusty* (*Trademark)” fight out of the way, we had the sails raised and motorsailed the 57 nautical miles to Green Turtle. It would have been nice to turn the engine off, but we wanted to have the anchor down before dark. Now that we know how casual the check-in process is, next time we’ll sail as far as we can and simply arrive in Green Turtle on day three. Continue reading “Our introduction to the Abacos.” →