Take the plunge, swimming with pigs is possible on Big Major Cay in the Exumas, Bahamas
While longing to swim in a turquoise ocean under a cobalt sky I painted a pig on a beach in the Bahamas. The painting celebrates two colors that don’t go together, except on a grand scale in the natural world where they are exactly right. I arranged to crew on a multi-hull sailboat in the Bahamas through an ad in Latitude 38 sailing magazine.
The captain, a young woman from Poland and I met in Fort Lauderdale and left for the Bahamas on an overnight sail. Unfortunately, we ran smack into a freak storm. Nineteen hours of raging seas left us exhausted and unkempt. We anchored and marched single file down a scorching, newly paved road to the customs office to check into the country, our flip flops smacking in sticky tar.
The officers wanted to know what we did for a living and who we were to each other. Three strangers who had met online, got on a boat and sailed straight into violet weather didn’t sound sane or reliable. Offering that we were just friends raised eyebrows. The young gal answered questions with one word, tersely. Her teeny shorts and crop top desperately clung to an abundance of curvy features. The men stared at her while our captain complained loudly about too many forms. He was half my size and the girl resembled neither of us. We looked like annoyed kidnappers in the sex trade industry. The captain left most of the form blank and tossed it on the desk. At that point U.S. officials would have marched us into individual rooms to extract our real stories.
An officer asked what our plans were and another took our passports into a back room to make long-distance calls with a rotary phone. I watched him through the open door. He looked concerned. The other well-pressed man in uniform stayed at his desk with our captain’s incomplete form, his hand weighing it down. The captain had instructed me not to say anything, which made me wonder what he was hiding. Blindly trusting strangers isn’t always smart, but I do it because sometimes things work out just fine.
The girl pouted behind dark shades and turned her back on everyone. The captain continued making disparaging remarks about the length of the forms, then crossed his arms and smoldered. The other official returned, sat down and put his hand firmly on top of our passports. That left me face to face with two officials, our fate under their palms and two people I barely knew rudely ignoring them. For me that’s a recipe for becoming the chattiest person in any room.
I asked if they could recommend a mechanic because the engine on the boat was occasionally sputtering. I did not say that during the storm the engine had sucked in seawater and died in permanent spark arrest. I assumed they might not want people in their country in constant need of rescue.
Luckily, we had landed somewhere quite special. Our passports were stamped while we were being given directions to the mechanic, who happened to be a relative. Fortunately, bad manners had not ruffled Bahamian feathers.
