Trip to Hartford Cave

Friday, 14 June





Friday morning it began to rain about 0430. That is a wonderful way to wake up when your 150 gallon water tank is down to 45 gallons! I can stretch water when I need to, I just haven't been. I rinse off the dog every time she's in salt water. I rinse my gear when I snorkel. 150 gallons is a big tank for me and a dog. I caught 80 gallons that I saved, after I had washed stuff off, and gave the dog a bath





My sailing friends took off to explore the island on a rented golf cart, a great way to see the island.


I took the Whaler to find Hartford Cave, on the backside of the island. Remembering that the journey is the adventure, the trip around the point took me through some awesome water.





Garmin's cartography is developed somewhat by someone looking at aerial images, and guesstimating depths. Where a very dark image shows, often it is marked as a rock, when the bottom is actually grass in 20' of water. It's all about reading the water, and plotters are merely aids to navigation....





The southwestern side of the island is pot-marked with holes/sea caves in the rocky cliffs. There was one picturesque stone arch.





I saw one of the cows from the wild herd standing along the grassy area between a couple of the cliffs. I wonder, since beef is flavored by the type of grass a cow eats, what these cows must taste like. One of the locals told me that from time to time they go kill a cow...





The Flamingo Bay anchorage appears fantastic for a southerly, or southeasterly wind. There was a swell/surge similar to that like we encountered at Calabsh Bay on the day that I was there (with 16kt SE breeze.) There is deep white sand with black coral reefs. Yellow is elkhorn coral coming close to the surface. Some of the dark is grass. I would have no trouble loosely following Explorers waypoint and Garmin's track through the southern end, visually dodging reefs, with the trawler, with good light and visibility. From your anchorage, there are abundant patch reefs to snorkel or dive by dinghy. After the anchorage, the further around you go, the more abundant, and shallower the patch reefs get.





If you can make the passage without raising your blood pressure or destroying morale yelling at your crew, this is a good anchorage in the right conditions.





Hartford Cave is visible from the sea. It's eyebrow looking arch behind a 75' deep sandy beach awaited our arrival. We put a bow and stern anchor out, and flippered ashore floating a dry bag with my camera, lights, shoes, and assorted other treasures.





Some of the goat population evidently hangs in the coolness of the cavern, as evidenced by their droppings everywhere. If you think goat turds on your knees or hands will kill you, you might want to skip this one.





Hartford Cave is really a small cavern, with no area I could find out of natural light. That doesn't mean you don't need a flashlight... you do, you just probably don't need to lug a secondary light. What you need the flashlight for, and the reason I'm here, is to see the ancient (pre-Columbus) carvings in the wall. Bobby told me since I was there, that there are over 400 carvings, though I didn't find the numbers like that. Probably the reason I didn't, is that due to the huge amounts of rain here the past few months, parts of the walls are coated in green, and the algae obscures the petrogliffs.





If graffiti artists or carvers drew that stuff on a wall today, we would call it defacing a cave. But, hundreds of years later, they become historical. I was personally disappointed with the carvings I saw, as they didn't look that old, and impressed me more as defacing than historical. When I told Bobby that, he told me I just had missed a bunch of them. I'm not sure I'm willing to go snipe hunting twice, but, I suppose I've done some pretty dumb things...





Friday afternoon, when the sailors returned from their golf cart adventure, I took the golf cart and went a little further than I had previously walked. I was sent to see if it was too late to place an order for supper at either of the restaurants in town. Both cooks told me they like to know in the morning, or at least by 2. Neither were willing to begin preparing meals for 5 people at 5 o'clock in the afternoon.





The mailboat had arrived that morning, and re provisioned the town, and the one bar/restaurant had a half a dozen guys sitting under the tree, enjoying their first rum in a week. One man that was too drunk to stand wanted a ride home. Oh, and he wasn't sure which way that was. One of the young men in town, Patrick, who I'd met before, loaded him on the golf cart, and together, we took him to his drive way, where, upon disembarking the golf cart, promptly fell over in his driveway. We departed, leaving him for his family, including one teen-aged young man embarrassed by association. What a sad state of disrepair of a life.





I returned Patrick to where he'd joined me, and made one pass up the hill to see the view. I called John, on the Full Deck, to get him to pull some marinated beef strips from the freezer to begin defrosting, and ambled back to the boat. Maybe I'll have more time to explore ashore later.





I cook on the grill 95% of the time, but the no-see-ums and mosquitoes drove me inside, and I turned on the generator, air conditioner, and stove to cook a meal for me and my sailing buds. We had a great time visiting.