The Zombies of Rum Cay
The guidebooks make Rum Cay sound like a special little piece of paradise in an already heavenly chain of islands, here in the Bahamas. The best snorkeling and spear-fishing around, a great marina and restaurant, friendly people, long beaches, azure waters and most of the amenities a cruiser might want.
So when we drove the dinghy up to the marina entrance and found it silted in, with sand piled to four feet above the water line, we were a little disappointed.
Rum Cay was our second stop on the four-leg trip to the Turks and Caicos (since amended to a one-stop plus 40-hour sail). A storm was brewing in the weather models so we planned to stay here for two or three days, possibly riding it out in the marina. Sailing in from the west, the water here struck me as a completely unique and astonishing blue, differentiated from the turquoise-greens of the rest of the Bahamas. Like an electric or neon blue. Photos don’t do it justice. A three-mile beach, empty save for a few little colourful shacks, stretched the length of the western tip of the island and made for a scenic approach to the vaunted cay.
We anchored with only two other boats, a drastic difference from the mob-scene at Georgetown, where up to 300 cruisers lay at anchor at any given time, more like a Walmart parking lot than a tropical cove. It had been a short sail and we arrived at lunch time, so thought we’d treat ourselves at the marina and ask a few questions about finding good shelter from the coming storm.
“Uh, is that the marina cut?” Liza asked from the back of the dingy. Some broken pilings and the remains of a dock lay on the north edge, and a break-water stretched down the south, but the entrance was a beach that couldn’t possibly clear water even at high tide. We asked a local who was fishing off the dock if there was another entrance, but he just grunted in response, shrugging.
We tied up the dinghy to a rotten piling and trudged ashore. A few masts were visible beyond a rise of land, but the dock and buildings nearest the bay were abandoned husks, obviously blown out in a hurricane. The masts turned out to be from the sad remains of wrecked boats, one of them sunk past its gunnels in the shallow marina harbour. We couldn’t even identify the site of the marina buildings proper, nor its famous restaurant (once purported to be the best this side of the BVIs).
“It feels post-apocalyptic,” I said, picking a sharp burr out of my foot while scanning the various wrecks for zombies.
We explored in silence for a few minutes before retreating to the dinghy. The warm, cloudless afternoon belied the creepy feeling of the place.
After a brief stop at another ruined dock, we buzzed our little craft out towards the two other sailboats in the bay. An American couple told us that Flamingo Bay, on the north-west corner of the island, was a sound holding, although made dangerous by numerous coral heads. Two France-french guys shrugged at our questions and just told us they were going spear-fishing on the massive nearby reef (we later found out they were unsuccessful).
The night was peaceful and we slept easily, after spending the previous evening rolling around in a sub-par anchorage on Long Island. The morning was cloudy and the wind was starting to pick up, so we lifted anchor and motor-sailed the eight miles west to Flamingo, where we’d decided to ride out the storm. It showed as a relatively open crescent of land that would provide good protection from the south and south-east winds, with surrounding reef that should tame the prevailing north swell.
“It’s a fucking minefield,” I cursed, standing high on the pushpit at the front of the boat where I had a better vantage to see through the water to anything lying below.
Flamingo Bay sucks. Don’t go there unless you absolutely have to. We had to because the winds were showing 25-30 knots from the south, but in hindsight I wished we’d just toughed it out at sea. The charts show a volume of reef, but they don’t do the chaos justice – we eventually gave up trying to dodge the coral heads and just trusted that they’d stay at least six feet below the surface, as shown on the charts. It took almost an hour to wend half a mile into the bay where the water was shallow enough for a comfortable anchorage.
The reef did thankfully quash most of the northern swell, though with the still-prevailing east winds we were rolling somewhat at first anchor. A uniform grey sky turned the waters in the bay a dull green. We took the dinghy out to check the dozen-or-so coral heads that lay within the swing radius of our anchor, and they blissfully all appeared to leave at least nine feet overhead at low water. Huge tracts of reef lay on our north and west, and a long curve of untouched beach stretched to the east and south. The bay felt protected the way a jail cell might in a bad thunderstorm – you’re not sure which you’d prefer.
As the winds picked up and the ocean turned rough, we spent a long, quiet day reading, crammed together in the cockpit away from a humid heat down in the cabin. Meals were bare and we ended the day with a haphazard game of cribbage, for which no one really knew the rules. I won.
The night was miserable. Swinging from east to west-south-west and rising to 30 knots in the gusts, the wind pushed Gaia around her tight parking space and set my nerves on edge. The anchor chain kept wrapping around the snub line and grating against the bowspirit a few feet from my head in the vee-berth; outside, the noise was barely audible, but inside it felt and sounded like how your molars must feel when your wisdom teeth are being removed. I got maybe an hour of sleep, and had anxious dreams where nothing moved fast enough.
After the kind of night where you get out of bed five times to check on the boat in the rain and the dark, we all shuffled out of our cabins at dawn, unable to rest any further as Gaia swayed and creaked around us. All were blurry-eyed and cranky, and conversation was kept to a minimum.
Turns out Rum Cay does have zombies.
