Guest blogger — Cupcake Afloat

Cupcake fans, you are in luck today. This is guest-blogger Sherry reporting from Thomas Cay, while Jonathan fries up some bacon, Moss does math, and Big Jim and Ellen drink coffee and read.

Thomas Cay is a low, uninhabited island across a cut from Joe Cay. On Thomas there’s a lovely sand beach with lizards, a pair of speedy white crabs, and a spider that I nearly walked into and took my breath away. Very large. The beach and the ironstone shore are littered with conch shells, some bleached white and others turned black and decaying. There’s a path up through the palms and scrubby brush to a beach on the cut where there are peculiar round pieces of coral, each with a tiny hole in the middle. The Cupcake crew have named this buttonhole beach and have two strings of these little talismanic objects hanging on the boat. Across the cut, Joe Cay has some kind of private house/resort with its own beach. I saw a golf cart on the beach yesterday. There are some ledges between us and Little Pipe Cay, where there is either a resort or an enormous estate. We watched a seaplane land and then take off from little Pipe Cay, and there’s a building right on the beach that may be the hangar. We’ve had to monitor it closely as the door has opened and closed several times, requiring us to reach for the binoculars and squint to see what they’re up to. It’s exhausting. (We also salute the people of Little Pipe Cay for modern approach to internet security in their wifi password, because it was neither “Password” nor “Guest1234”. Safeguards are in place.)

Moss and Eliot hard at work designing a board game.

***Okay, while I was typing that last paragraph two seaplanes just landed, and now there is a rainbow whose pot-of-gold end is at Little Pipe Cay. Rumor has it that both Johnny Depp and the Aga Khan live around here, so I keep expecting Johnny Depp to show up with a tray of bloody Marys and an invitation to come ashore for a shower. But it hasn’t happened yet. Perhaps today.***

Now that he is nearly 50 (47, but we round up on this boat), Jim has complicated eyeglass needs. His birthday was Saturday.

Between us and Little Pipe Cay there is a passage where enormous speedboats equipped with triple 300 hp outboards come blazing through, loaded down with tourists and playing rock-and-roll at a volume loud enough to be heard over the roar of the engines. Apparently there’s a tour cycle where you can start in Georgetown and take a day trip, first to see the swimming pigs of Big Majors, then to another Cay where there are iguanas, and finally to Thunderball Grotto, undoubtedly knocking back rum drinks all the while. Our hosts did take us to Big Majors, but we skipped the side of the anchorage with the swimming pigs (and their poop) in favor of Cruiser’s beach and quiet. We did get treated to Thunderball, which is an island that has a cave in the middle of it. You can snorkel under the rock and then you find yourself in a cavern that’s half underwater and half out of the water (there’s a tiny hole above through which sunlight filters). It’s full of fish and we’d no sooner arrived than we were snorkeling in this remarkable place. I expect there’s a better and perhaps illustrated description of Thunderball elsewhere on the blog.

Because the sizzling of bacon has ceased and now the eggs are cooking, I’ll switch to speed mode.

Good things:

* a sky almost completely free of any land-based lights, full of stars, clear and dark and sparkling. A 7-year old boy with a star chart, curious and able to see in the sky what’s on the chart.

* in the same nighttime darkness, mysterious and beautiful green phosphorescent shapes. Big Jim thinks they are jellyfish and they were vaguely jellyfish sized, with an eerie green light that spun, twisted, and dissolved. They surrounded us for about fifteen minutes, drifting on the strong current, and then were gone.

* The mayor of Gaulin paid us four visits. On the first, we shared our bacon with him. On the second, he brought us a sympathy lobster. On the third, he brought us cold beer, and on the fourth, another lobster. He also stayed for stories and was as generous with advice as he was with delicacies.

* Big Jim’s birthday included two spotted eagle rays and a molten chocolate cake.

* Moss and Eliot have invented a board game that gets more elaborate with every hour they spend together, and it delights them.

*there are more good things but breakfast is imminent so I must leave them to your imagination.

* Boat-baked bread is delicious.

Not-so-good things:

* We failed to catch the largest Mahi in the world when we made our passage on Friday, even after following the mayor’s advice AND cutting through a school of leaping fish. We were SO READY: I had the cheap vodka in the squirt bottle and the kids were holding the cockpit cushions, ready to throw them below so we could bring the fish aboard and do the bloody job of killing it. But we remained fishless.

* We failed to catch ANY lobsters in and around Gaulin and Sampson’s, even though we’re sure there are many lurking and laughing at us. Hence the sympathy lobsters. (They tasted delicious, even though I expect there’s a special flavor to a lobster caught oneself).

* Solar panel failure. One of the solar panels has stopped working, and there’s an elaborate logic game of trying to figure out where a US shipper can send the panel to, and then how to get it to a port that will make sense given the cruising plan. I think the solution will involve shipping it to us when we’re back in the US, and we’ll send it either to someplace called “Doughboy’s” or to somewhere called “Top and Bottom”. But we’ve considered variations that involve Pinky, Jeff, or even possibly Chubby, at ports ranging from Fort Lauderdale to Staniel Cay to Georgetown. It may be necessary to unplug the electric toothbrush if the power situation gets dire.

*Jonathan had a nasty knife cut on his second favorite pointy finger that has required both Big Jim and Ellen to supervise dressing and the changing of dressings, and to issue medical instructions (largely ignored by Jonathan). Jonathan’s healing, but it did make me see how careful you need to be around here. Everything is fine, but should things be un-fine, it would be a matter of a couple of hours to Staniel Cay and then an airplane ride to a place where you could get medical treatment. It feels so civilized and self-sufficient here on board, and it is, but the solar panel and the wound remind me that the safety nets all around us on shore are hours away, and require a fair amount of thinking and planning to get to.

*Thomas Cay iced tea is only delicious to one adult on board. In case you have deviant tastes, here is the recipe: Cold-brewed Lipton tea, lime juice, and bourbon. Motto: “tastes like paint thinner, but makes you feel like a winner.” I advise skipping the Lipton and the lime juice, myself.

* Still waiting on Johnny Depp and that tray of bloody marys.

Breakfast is served, so that’s all for now. When we crack the Little Pipe Cay’s password, we’ll post this….

Jonathan and Jim trying to decide if swimming with the sharks is prudent.

Ellen isn’t the only one who can take a decent selfie.