For many cruisers who cross to the Bahamas from Florida and don’t stop to clear customs & immigration at West End (Grand Bahama) or Bimini or even the more eastern Spanish Cay, Green Turtle is the popular place to clear in if headed to the Abacos.

Just a short ferry ride from the mainland (Great Abaco Island), Green Turtle is one of the earliest settlements in Abaco. With pirate, African, and Loyalist roots, and with ties to its sister city Key West, Green Turtle was once the largest settlement in Abaco. A dwindling population of approximately 500 residents doesn’t stop the cay from hosting many celebrations throughout the year.

Timeline:

• 1718: Pirate Charles Vane (see Black Sails on Netflix) fled Nassau and hid out on GTC
• 1828: Migration to Key West began (not sure why, but they sure chose well)
• 1899: Sisal production was the most important industry (and very labor intensive)
• 1948: Bahamas Airways began service using seaplanes
• 1954: electricity arrives!
• 1977: Green Turtle Cay named the Sister City of Key West

We’ve stopped here many times before on our way into the Abacos or out. Always a welcoming stop, with several well stocked grocery stores, eateries, historic sites and beaches; not to mention the well-known Green Turtle Club and Bluff House.

Recent visits have been at Donny’s Marina in Black Sound (yes, as opposed to White Sound), where Donny offers moorings and dockage.

We arrived (as is usual for us) ahead of a cold front, because that’s often when conditions are mild. Russ went ashore to the pink rectangular gov’t building to clear customs but the official had left early so, well, it’s the Bahamas mon.

Friday, the next day, he tried again. Paperwork complete ahead of time. The customs official was usually stationed at the Treasure Cay airport so not only wasn’t he familiar with boat clearing in, but the building got locked by mistake so those checking in had to sit on the porch, in the wind, papers blowing about. Russ even had to tell the man how much we owed- boy $50 would be a perfect amount- but we paid the $150 for our boat size.

The front arrived that afternoon with a vengeance. Feel it, see it, hear it.

Line to us and one to sailboat rafted to another at the dock, to keep us off the dock a bit.

The large sail cat on the dock opposite us had a line tied to a dock cleat- bad idea.

Russ braves wind and rain to secure bow line of boat that broke off a dock cleat

I am always happy to be the warm and dry photographer!

Donny comes out to assist and claim his dock cleat- held in right hand

Wind and rain let up eventually and we walked through town, purchased our annual Bahamian calendar then walked the beach.

Pretty blue sky the day after- or maybe two.

When we depart it’s on to… well that depends on the weather!

Tahiti Beach- not much beach exposed at high tide

Surprise! We are crossing sooner than later. Not exactly music to my ears, but not sour notes either. One minute it looked like we had a week until the right conditions, and the next- bam- how about Thurs, 3 days from now? That fickle weather thing. The approaching cold front was going to stall and allow us a two-day window to travel 170nm from our marina base to Green Turtle Cay, Abaco where we’d clear in and wait out the front.

We didn’t have to take this window but it looked good and since we had a rental car for Tues & Wed for final provisioning, it was doable. If we weren’t so experienced with the prep process, this rush would have been a bad idea, but this is our 6^th crossing. 🙂

As you can see from the title, I’d planned on one long post for our time here before our esteemed guests arrived Jan 6. Then we picked up the latest Destination Abaco (free glossy tourist booklet) and the past quarter’s Abaco Life mini magazine. We always glean an interesting fact or two about Abaco history and/or local residents/happenings.

What I’ll do is share some history (taken from the above mentioned booklets) about Green Turtle Cay, Treasure Cay, Man-o-War Cay, Marsh Harbor and Hope Town in a few separate posts and include any worthy photos taken while we were there. Treasure was on our stop list but we didn’t make it there this time.

With a month to bounce around the Abacos; we hoped to spend time at all our favorite places and we did!  The weather cooperated much better than one would expect, even for December, with long stretches of settled conditions that included NO rain and NO wind over 12kts and many days of “light & variable”- my absolute favorite forecast.

Our bouncing went like this: Green Turtle to Hope Town to Man o’ War, to Marsh, to Tahiti Beach, to off Firefly, down to Little Harbor, back up to Marsh Harbor, over to Hope Town and back to Marsh for our marina reservation starting Jan 3.

Our Spectra watermaker gave us some grief early on because when you don’t make water (just flushing every few days isn’t the same) for a couple of months, and then you do- well stuff happens- or in our case- it didn’t happen! Russ resolved the problem without nearly killing himself as he did last December and Spectra has sent parts to our son who will play delivery guy.

Our (one and only) toilet has this solenoid thing that makes the fresh flushing water operate- or not. 🙂 Of course we have a spare and that has become the new operating part but not a perfect one, so the company has sent another to guess who? 😉 Now we have, if I may quote our dear one, “all the amenities!  … the five-star experience you can expect aboard Twin Sisters!” Russ & I both cracked up laughing at that. Here we thought we just had the essentials!

Hopefully that does it for boat troubles, but we still have months to go and you know how stuff comes in threes- we have two so far. Stay tuned my friends- I’ve been too long without posting!