ANOTHER HOP

Green Turtle Cay, Abacos, Bahamas 26º39.89N | 77º19.9W

We took a baby step to the next waiting room, a 2-hour sail to Green Turtle via the infamous Whale Cut, an open space between the sound and the wide open ocean, known for being unruly. We tiptoed through on a calm day while the whale was sleeping and anchored in the bustling waters in the lee of Green Turtle.

Loyalist kitchen dating to the mid-1800s.

Green Turtle is a charming island with a museum dedicated to local history, a well-documented history that includes the indigenous Lucayan people, the first western explorers, and eventually the loyalists who fled the United States during the Civil War bringing their slaves along with them. It is these last two groups, the British loyalists and the former slaves, that seem to have found a way to live together cheerfully on this seemingly peaceful island. How they worked that out, I'd like to know.

Lucayan artifacts in the Green Turtle museum.

The other two groups did not learn to live together at all. The long extinct Lucayans fell to germs and weapons borne on the hands of Christopher Columbus and other European explorers. Those who survived were spirited away and lived out their days as slaves in Europe. Now, on Green Turtle Cay, it is only the stones and ghosts that remain.

But back to the agenda. Every morning we listen to Chris Parker, hoping for the weather off the U.S. coast to sort itself out. Every morning we find that it hasn't. And so we wait, on islands where we have internet connection to look at the weather with our own eyes.

Next stop: Spanish Cay.

Door handle on the Green Turtle historical museum.

Model ships made by a descendant of the original Loyalist settlers.