Untie the Lines by Emma Bamford

Author:Emma Bamford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

18

Bahamian rhapsody

Cerulean. Turquoise. Aquamarine. Cobalt. All types of blue, and all words that wouldn’t be out of place in a hyperbolic travel brochure for the Exuma islands in the Bahamas.

But unless you’ve got a dictionary to hand, or have a job as a colour-matcher for Crown paint, there’s a chance you won’t know the exact shade of blue I was referring to if I described the waters of Compass Cay, where we were now anchored, as lapis lazuli or azure.

So I’ll give it to you straight and you’ll just have to use your imagination. Blue. Take the bluest blue you can imagine and then Photoshop it in your mind to make it bluer. Add a blue filter and take out any hints of yellow or green. And then add some more blue. Got it? Are you imagining the bluey-est blue that you can? Good. And yet you’re probably only halfway to picturing the sea around the Exuma islands as it really is.

If I thought Bimini was beautiful, it had nothing on the Exumas. These are a group of 365 nubby islands in the middle of the Bahamian chain, stretching like the vertebrae of a spinal column 130 miles south-east through the Atlantic Ocean. They’re low-lying, sandy, palm-treed, surrounded-by-water, perfect tropical islands.

Their northern sides are exposed to the wild winds and waves of the Atlantic Ocean, where the trade winds whip up the water to a white froth that never ends. That side of the islands is no place for a sailing boat to be. One bad judgement and you’re easily being dashed on to the limestone rocks and shipwrecked.

On the southern side, however, it’s a completely different story. It’s calm. It’s shallow. It’s protected. There’s nothing there – precious few houses; no roads. There are creamy beaches where the only footprints are the ones you’ve just left behind you, and you can have a whole cove to yourself if you want. It’s the Caribbean idyll ramped up to the max – natural beauty, space and isolation. Several of the Exumas are private islands with their own airstrips, popular destinations for the super-rich because they are so remote. This is where Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin came on a ‘break-up vacation’ not long after they’d ‘consciously uncoupled’, presumably to talk without fear of a paparazzo photographing them from across the street. In the Exumas, that’s unthinkable – there are no streets.

Papagayo was headed to Compass Cay (you pronounce it ‘key’), one of these little nubs, for two reasons. The first was that at some point we needed to pass through the island chain from the sheltered south-west Exuma Sound to the northern Atlantic side in order to continue our journey. The other was that, although we were technically ‘delivering’ the yacht from Texas to St Lucia, and were in a bit of a hurry having lost several weeks in the States, we were still a bunch of travellers, we’d heard great things about the place, and we wanted to experience legendary Caribbean beauty for ourselves.

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