Caribbean Soul: Chub Cay

On Tuesday, Feb 28 we left Great Harbor Cay for what we hoped would be telephones in Chub Cay. Also, if we decided to continue our trip on south to George Town, Exumas to pick up our forwarded mail before we head back to Beaufort, Chub Cay would be on the way south. Of course, we couldn’t just zip over to Chub. We sailed for 6 ½ hours across the banks to the Northwest Shoals and anchored on the banks again out of sight of land. It was not dangerous but very rolly all night as we were getting a surge from the deep ocean nearby.

The next day, Wednesday, Feb 29, we motored for 3 ½ hours to Chub Cay. Although we were heading directly into the wind, there wasn’t much wind and the seas were very calm. Here’s a picture of Captain John during this trip to Chub—he’s looking pretty calm too! When not snoozing on the dinghy, John was fishing again with the hand line. This time, however, we were not so lucky—John caught two good sized fish, but they were barracudas! We tossed them back.

After we anchored at Chub Cay, we put the dinghy back in the water and motored into Chub Cay Club Marina. It was a big, fancy place with lots of expensive floating docks, but mostly empty slips—just a few sport fishing boats. We found a nice dinghy dock and wandered over to the restaurant & bar which wasn’t open yet—it was around 3PM. Right in front of the restaurant was a public phone that had instructions for using a credit card—yea. But wait—the phone seemed to be rimmed in crusty salt or something and we could not get a dial tone. We’re in the Bahama’s mon—you try not to let these things bother you, but we did need a telephone! A building near the restaurant said “registration” so we went in to ask the lady at the front desk about the telephone. She told us what we already knew—the public phone didn’t work—so we asked her to help us. She was glad to lend us the office phone and said that she’d charge us $1 a minute for a call to the US. How wonderful is that! We would have paid anything at that point. I dialed Mom and had a very nice conversation about how she was and what she needed to have us do. She wasn’t interested in having us change our travel plans, but did admit that it would be nice to have us back home earlier. She also said that she was pretty much pain free, but getting around wasn’t easy and that Nancy was helping her a great deal—in fact, Nancy was out getting her prescriptions filled and groceries bought.

From there we wandered around Chub Cay Club, which seemed to be another very expensive ghost town. As you can see from the pictures, the houses and the beach are beautiful—but empty.

The construction on this restaurant just halted and is now suffering much neglect—we call it “arrested development.” We ate dinner and watched Carolina beat Maryland at the little shack-like restaurant nearby. The bartender said he didn’t know why construction on the big beach-front restaurant had stopped, but that the swimming pools were open and usable. Here are pictures of “arrested development” and the infinity pool out front.