April 9, 2010.

I spent the evening reading everything I could about cooling systems to see what we could do about Savage Son. After refreshing my knowledge base I slept well and headed over to the Savage Son at 0830 the next morning.

We decided to remove the end caps from the heat exchanger to check for a blockage. So Bob went to close the raw water seacock to the engine. This was the first step in Bob’s downward spiral from esteemed former surgeon to cruising dumbass. You see, when he knelt to close the seacock just imagine both our surprise when he stood and announced that the seacock was still closed from the other day when we originally addressed his overheating issue.

That meant that when he left the anchorage yesterday the engine was doomed to overheat almost immediately. It all worked out well in the end but it was kinda fun as Bob crowned himself “Dumbass”.

We ran the boat for 15 minutes and found everything to be working properly. We had planned to dinghy the 2 miles into Little Harbor but instead Bob offered to take Solitaire’s and Veranda’s dinghies in tow and take the big boat closer to town. So, with all of us onboard that’s exactly what we did.


Savage Son dropped the hook just outside the towns narrow, very shallow entrance channel. We boarded the dinks and headed in to explore. Little Harbor is a tiny virtually landlocked harbor with a pub, a gallery, a cave and a scattering of homes overlooking the water.

The pub was still closed so we had to start with the gallery. The gallery is run by a guy and his family whose dad was evidently a little bit of an eccentric. Forty years ago the dad brought his wife and three young sons here on a small sailboat. There was nothing here so they were able to acquire the land around most of the harbor. For a short while they lived aboard the boat before moving into a nearby cave, which seems to be a recurring theme here in the Bahamas. I'm surprised that "Flintstone' is not a common Bahamanian surname.

While living in the cave dad built em’ a house. Dad was also an accomplished artist, working with paints and cast bronze sculpture. Dad has since passed on to the great studio in the sky. Two of the sons have moved on while the third son, Pete, works as an artist, maintains a gallery and owns the local pub.

There were a lot of neat things to see but after 20 minutes we were headed over to the cave. All I can say about the cave is…….
their sailboat must have been a pretty depressing piece of shit if they moved off of it, into this cave. The floor of the cave was wall to wall boulders and cracks with very little level ground. I’m sure that back in the day it sounded a lot like “Mom!, Petey fell into the crevice again!”. This place will never make the cover of “Better Caves and Gardens”.

Anyway, after the cave we were off to the pub. It was a typical waterfront beach pub with tee shirts and reminders of guests long past.
A sandy floor, shady seating, a cool bar and excellent food made Pete’s Pub a pleasant stop. Oh yeah, that and the cold beer.

After lunch we dinghied out into the mangroves and found the rumored blue hole. The tide was coming in and you could feel the cold ocean waters swirling up from the black depths of the blue hole. There were some large fish milling about and several schools of smaller fish. I considered fishing it but on the shore partially obscured by the mangroves was a bronze plaque dedicated to the memory of 3 guys who drowned there back in the nineties. Kinda gave me the heebie jeebies.

Back at the big boat it was once again, raise the hook and motor back over to the more protected anchorage at Lynyard Cay where we’ll stay to hide from a few days of gale force winds from the east north east.