Sailing Ohana

We joined all our friends in Rock Sound late in the day on Easter Sunday. The town has a week-long celebration around Easter, during which they blast insanely loud music across the harbor from about 5:00 pm to about 2:00 am, so that was a tough start.

Rock Sound is reputed to have tiger sharks, so we were not able to swim off the boat, so we went ashore to explore. The dinghy dock has a well-built set of stairs so that anyone who can’t climb a ladder (dogs, for example) could get onto the dock easily, as long as the tide was high enough to reach the bottom step. Jackson did some cast-netting and caught some little fish and a large needle fish. There is not really a beach to speak of, and the shore is fairly rocky and inhospitable to Morris. There are a lot of stray and semi-stray dogs in the area.

The two big attractions in Rock Sound are the “Cathedral Caves” and an “Ocean Hole”, which is an inland deep blue saltwater hole (600+ meters deep) that is attached to the ocean via tunnels. It’s full of fish that like to be fed pieces of bread. We realized we needed to move to a more Morris-friendly anchorage before the predicted heavy winds trapped us for days, so we decided to check out the caves and ocean hole before we left. The caves were beautiful and full of bats, and the ocean hole was teeming with fish. We were met by a pack of dogs when we walked to the ocean hole, which reinforced our feelings that we needed to go.

My strongest memory of our two days in Rock Sound is of realizing that we will be heading north on Eleuthera and that our friends on SV Grace would be staying at Rock Sound with the other kid boats for several days during the “blow”. They will probably not be moving at the same pace as us after that. We knew that we would have to part ways at some point as we head home and they continue their adventure, but I wasn’t prepared for it to be so soon. They didn’t feel comfortable going to the anchorages further north where we were heading, and we couldn’t spend a handful more days in Rock Sound. We decided to stay for one extra night so that we could have dinner with them and give us all a chance to say goodbye, in case we don’t cross paths again before we set our sails for Florida. Oliver made a Nutella pizza for Jackson’s birthday since we wouldn’t be together to celebrate his real birthday at the end of May. I will never forget watching them drive their dinghy back to Grace as both sets of boys called “ah-rooooooo, ah-rooooooo, ah-rooooooo,” back and forth to each other. They sounded like howling puppies, and it made my heart hurt. I cried a lot that day. Goodbyes are hard, and finding special friends like the Barnetts is a rare and special gift.