Before you weigh anchor any further, keep your weather eye peeled for two hidden words plucked from my desk calendar. This week were two words I actually recognised but would never use them normally. Snollygoster (which is a shrewd or unprincipled person - I had to look at the description but I think I could have guessed it) and Bonhomie which I thought I knew but didn’t. It means cheerful and friendly - just the right description for my friend later on. OK that’s a small lexical treasure hunt for sharp‑eyed readers. Let’s get this week’s story under way.

The Marine Farm anchorage on Crooked Island in the Caribbean was to put it mildly – Stunning. A gentle sway, a soft breeze, the kind of anchorage that makes you believe everything will be fine. We swam in the clear blue waters and Pookie took a photo of a fish under the boat but we didn't have time to linger as time was our nemesis. We fired up the engines and motored thirty‑nine miles to Clarence Town on the nearby Long Island. Now my favourite cocktail is a “Long Island Iced Tea” and now I was at the very heart of the drink’s infamy I thought I would give it a go.

The lighthouse point restaurant sat next to the Customs office, but it closed and shuttered. I had been hoping to bring my Mum and Pookie ashore for some food but alas it was a disappointment that stung more than it should have. I was starting to see a pattern here of long passages and few places to actually go to. I waited my turn with two others – it was a laboriously long process that swallowed two hours of my life. The Bahamian officials were thorough, I will give them that, but a little heads up wouldn’t have gone amiss.. something like “Watch out for the sharks - Both kinds”.

This is because the natural ones patrolled the marina outside with lazy menace. Fishermen gutted their catches on the pontoons and tossed the remains into the water, creating a buffet that attracted every toothy resident in the bay. The human sharks nearby operated differently. They sat in cars and demanded money for services nobody requested. As I had gone ashore I was met by some cruisers who warned me “Watch your dinghy…Moor it here and you’re likely to get asked for money – we did.”

Here were two people I’d never met before telling me how they had been strong‑armed into paying a man in a car for the privilege of tying up at a public dock. Public dock. The words felt important. I walked straight past the man in the car on my way to customs, offering nothing but the cold shoulder. That snollygoster in his vehicle had been demanding thirty‑five dollars for nothing more than the privilege of parking on a public dock. On my return I stopped a passing Police car and asked whether payment was required. They seemed uncomfortable. They didn't say no. They didn't say yes. They certainly didn't admit to knowing about the charlatan running what amounted to a protection racket without the protection. They drove on.

As I returned to the dock the police car was just pulling away. The man never came over. I never offered. We decided to anchor on the opposite side of the bay at a place aptly named “Sandy Point”. Here we enjoyed a quiet night in.

George Town beckoned next and we dropped anchor just as a mother dolphin and her baby swam past with the sort of grace that makes you feel clumsy just watching. We all took the dinghy ashore and slipped under the Queen's Highway bridge into Victoria Harbour. The water here flows free and so does the dinghy parking behind Exuma Markets. We wandered through the aisles and my eyes nearly fell out of my head. Nine dollars for a bell pepper. Nine. In England that buys you a small forest of vegetables. But the alternative was starvation and we were not quite ready for that dramatic an exit. We stocked up.

The Peace and Plenty hotel provided our evening meal and it lived up to its name. The food arrived, the drinks followed and we sat in contented silence watching the world drift past. An ice cream from a small shack rounded things off nicely and we returned to the boat satisfied with our achievements.

Stocking Island sits opposite George Town like a challenge. We had heard it was stunning. It was. We anchored right outside the Chat n Chill bar and grill and went ashore to spend the day doing exactly what the name suggests. The beach stretched out in fine white sand. The Long Island Iced Teas arrived in generous portions. Makeshift swings hung from the trees and we swung like children with no particular place to be.

Stingrays patrolled the shallows in great numbers, gliding past our legs with the confidence of creatures who have never known fear. They seemed happy to be petted, circling our ankles like aquatic cats waiting for the shack to prepare another conch salad so they could scavenge the scraps. My mother sat on the beach and watched from a safe distance. She does not share my enthusiasm for creatures that possess venomous barbs.

Here is a thing I learned about the Bahamas. The islands all start to blur after a while. Dusty roads wind past dilapidated beach houses. Old cars rust in driveways. Abandoned trucks with the odd wheel missing sink into the earth like forgotten monuments. The shops are small and poorly stocked and the prices would make a Saudi prince take a second look. Getting anything to these remote outposts costs a fortune and that fortune gets passed directly to the customer. The beaches remain lovely though. The water remains the best we have ever seen. But we found ourselves craving a little more life. A bar with twenty people in it often represented the absolute social epicentre of an entire island. If you remember from Blog 067 we had no cooking facilities and Pookie continued to offer us some fantastic uncooked food that actually helped us settle into enjoying the trip.

After a few days we moved on to Black Point, a mixture of houses and small shops that held our attention for exactly one night. Then Stanley Cay, only eight miles away, where the restaurant served conch salad and the cooks tossed the remains into the sea. The pontoon swarmed with nurse sharks, fat and lazy and hungry. Our friend Pam had been a few weeks earlier and had been in the water with them. She petted them like dogs. Then one took a little bite of her hand. Nothing serious. A “love bite”, she called it. I decided to stay on terra firma. The sharks were lovely to watch from a safe distance but you never can trust them. We played pool inside and ate a nice meal before walking along the island.

Just across from Stanley Cay lie two attractions. Pig Beach and Thunderball Grotto. The grotto sounded impressive but not impressive enough to drag us away from the prospect of swimming pigs. We motored round to the next bay, anchored and grabbed some food before taking the dinghy to the beach. We had not actually reached the shore when two or three pigs trotted into the water and began swimming toward us with surprising speed. I killed the engine immediately. The last thing I needed was to explain why our boat had turned a pig into crackling.

My mother had been keen on the idea right up until she saw the size of them. She took one look and decided the dinghy offered superior safety. The pigs it could be said, displayed a “forceful approach” to food acquisition. They could knock you off your feet without breaking a sweat. We decided to throw food away from us to keep them at a manageable distance. At the back of the beach, smaller more docile pigs lay in the shade of a hut. Pookie went over and petted a few of these. I took some photos whilst my Mum watched from the safety of the dinghy.

A fun fact about the swimming pigs of the Bahamas: nobody knows exactly how they got there. The most popular theory suggests sailors left them on the island as a future food source. The pigs had other ideas. They learned to swim and they learned to beg and now they live like kings. There is something beautiful about that. A plan that went entirely wrong and created something wonderful instead. A local swineherd stood nearby watching the game of cat and mouse between people with food and hungry pigs, a knowing smile playing on his lips as if he had seen this particular circus a thousand times before.

Our next main stop was to meet friends Pam and Theo, but before we reached them we happened upon a small anchorage with a rather unique aspect. The island that sheltered us from the Atlantic's brute force was barely more than a whisper of land, low and slender, its spine so modest that the ocean seemed to regard it with gentle contempt. Consequently it had been carved into a labyrinth of estuaries, each one a watery finger reaching deep into the island's interior. We took the dinghy and decided to go exploring. The map promised one particular channel would lead us to the north side of the island. What we found instead astonished us.

The estuary was so shallow that even our lightweight dinghy came to rest on the soft sand below. We had made the classic error of choosing low tide. For that day we simply sat as if we’d stumbled into our own private paddling pool, the water so crystalline and still that we could count every grain of sand beneath us. The sun beat down with a ferocity that seemed personal, its rays bouncing off the water and striking our faces from below as well as above. The afternoon air hung hot and heavy, laden with salt and the clean, sharp scent of untouched ocean. Not a breath of wind stirred the surface. The silence was profound, broken only by the gentle lapping of water against our hull and the distant cry of a gull wheeling somewhere far above. It felt like the world had forgotten we existed.

Pookie managed to attract some invisible creatures from the shallows and emerged with a rash on her legs afterwards. She scratched and grumbled but I think she considered the experience worth the cost. Some memories demand a small price. We sat there for hours, floating in that vast, silent bathtub, the sun painting our skin a deeper shade of brown and the salt drying into a fine white crust on our arms. It was the kind of stillness that makes you forget time exists.

The next morning, before we set off to meet Pam and Theo, we tried again. The tide had returned and we puttered into the channel once more, embarking on a journey through a landscape that felt entirely alien. The sun had already climbed high and the heat shimmered off the water in hazy waves. We motored slowly, the engine murmuring a low, steady drone that seemed almost apologetic for disturbing the quiet. The air, not quite yet warmed by the morning sun was thick and clean, each breath filling our lungs with the sharp tang of salt and the faint, earthy smell of mangrove mud.

It was like a moonscape, stark and strange, the silence so complete that our engine's putter felt like an intrusion. The tallest things were the mangrove bushes, their twisted roots clawing into the water like arthritic fingers, creating a tangled maze that seemed to close in around us. The channel meandered like a lazy snake, doubling back on itself, and I found my internal compass spinning uselessly in my skull. Turtles glided past with ancient indifference, their shells almost brushing against our hull as if we were nothing more than curious debris. Stingrays ghosted beneath us, their wings undulating in slow, hypnotic pulses, totally oblivious to our presence. Puttering along barely inches from the sandy bottom, the channel became so narrow in places that we could have reached out and touched either bank.

The water was so clear that we could see every detail of the seabed sliding past beneath us, the delicate patterns of sand ripples, the occasional flash of a silver fish, the dark shapes of conch shells half-buried in the shallows. The sun blazed overhead, so fierce that it bleached the world of colour, turning everything into a palette of white sand, turquoise water and deep green mangrove. It was the kind of silence that has weight, that presses against your eardrums and makes you speak in whispers even when there is nobody to hear.

It would have been very easy to get lost here. The channel twisted and turned with no regard for logic, disappearing around corners that revealed more of the same—mangroves, sand, water, silence. This was not a place where humans trod with any regularity. This was nature's private corridor, and we were uninvited guests. I kept glancing at the map on my phone, not because I doubted our direction, but because I needed the reassurance that we still existed in a world that had maps and coordinates.

Eventually we rounded a final bend and saw open sea ahead of us. The relief that washed over the boat was palpable. The channel widened, the mangroves fell away and the slow melodic ripples gave way to increasingly larger waves. We had emerged on the north side of the island, just as the map had promised, but the journey had felt like something far more significant. A small adventure into a forgotten corner of the world. I think to be honest everyone was a little relieved to see Sawasdeekat on the horizon again.

Our final stop before Nassau was Normans Cay. We had heard good things about a place called the Surf Club and how its food was delicious – 5 stars in fact. But… it had closed. Possibly permanently. The world is full of closed doors and this was just another one. Here we met up with Pam and Theo, Viking Explorer companions who had become firm friends. We had spent Christmas and New Year together in Martinique and the reunion brought a wave of bonhomie that washed away the lingering disappointment of the closed Surf Club.

We dropped anchor near Pablo Escobar's sunken plane. Or what people claim is Pablo Escobar's sunken plane. Pookie insists it actually belonged to his business partner. The distinction seemed academic once I got in the water. I had not intended to swim. I took the dinghy up to the wreck with no plans beyond looking from it. But some local sailors offered me their mask and I could not resist.

Snorkelling at the plane wreck in the Bahamas was absolutely amazing. The fuselage sits in crystal clear water, covered in marine life. Colourful fish dart in and out of the windows and search around the propellors for food. The whole thing feels surreal, like swimming through a history book that has been reclaimed by the ocean. I had to swim really really hard as I hadn’t brought fins. The plane rests in a deeper section where the Atlantic current forces its way between the islands with serious intent. But the effort was worth it.

Some experiences stay with you. This one will.

The Bahamas gave us sharks and pigs and stingrays and dolphins. It gave us turquoise water and fine white sand and prices that made us weep. It gave us a sunken plane and a closed surf club and (Pookie’s aside) the best iced tea I have ever tasted. But more than anything it gave us another chapter in this ridiculous wonderful adventure.

Our next stop is Nassau. Our final stop in the Bahamas. Subscribe if you want to follow along. I will drop you a reminder email next week so you can read about our adventures there.

Until then, just keep swimming – and watch out for them sharks.