After leaving Great Harbour Cay, we headed to Spanish Wells. Spanish Wells is technically the name of the town that sits on St. George’s Cay. The cay is only about 2 miles x 1 mile and is entirely made up of the town, so everyone just calls the cay Spanish Wells. It sits off the northern end of Eleuthera, one of the better known islands in the Bahamas. We knew we could get a good anchorage there and explore the town a little bit. It would also be easy for our friend Brian, who helped us with the crossing, to get to an airport to fly back home.
As the story goes, the cay was used as a last stop for the Spanish treasure fleets before heading back to the Iberian Peninsula. The ships supposedly refilled their water supply from wells there created for this purpose, hence the English name of Spanish Wells.
The first British colonists were adventurers from nearby Bermuda. They had planned to be some of the first settlers of Eleuthera but were shipwrecked on a reef known as the Devil’s Backbone in 1647. They first lived in a cave on the northern tip of Eleuthera, but eventually made their way to Spanish Wells. Later, loyalists to the British crown, settled there after fleeing the United States after the American Revolutionary War. Today, the main industries are tourism and spiny lobster fishing. The lobster processing plant here is the main supplier of Red Lobster in the US.
The town is beautiful. The tourist brochure notes that it’s known for its preventive maintenance, and we certainly saw evidence of this everywhere. Homes are well kept, lawns are beautifully manicured with lots of conch shell decorations and bougainvillea, and the ships and boats there are mostly carefully maintained.
In addition to exploring the town, we took advantage of the time at anchor to get the paddleboard going again, and also to try out our mini snuba that we will use to clean our hull. As we’ve mentioned before, it’s amazing how much growth accumulates on the hull in these warm salt waters (and that in turn slows the boat down), and now that we are in the gorgeous, clear waters of the Bahamas, it will be easy for us to clean our own hull rather than paying divers to do the job for us.
We saw Brian off at the Spanish Wells boat shuttle that would take him to Eleuthera and on to the airport and home. He was a great sailing companion, a great help as an able hand on the passage, and a great photographer. We will miss him and know that we will sail with him again.
