TURKS & CAICOS - BACK TO SAILING BY FAITH
Standing back on By Faith with her clean, freshly painted and ready for adventures, my handsome husband looks at me as we stand in our narrow galley. Michael asks me “So, has it hit you yet that we are really doing this? It was several years ago when you began to talk about living on a boat in the Caribbean and now we are doing it.” I smile. No, it has not hit me completely. We began sailing again just 5 days ago, leaving Dominican Republic to come to Turks and Caicos. We cried (okay, I cried) as we said our goodbyes to the wonderful friends we made in DR.
The details of cleaning, refitting, remembering details of sailing, provisioning, newly experienced sea sickness, my own kidney infection while working on the boat, a broken Autohelm in our first hour back into sailing, working through my own mistakes in being back on board has taken over at times (such as filling an 80 gallon water tank with 100 gallons of water…flooding Lauren’s stateroom). Yet I realize it again. God is so very good. We are here. My dream that God placed in my heart years ago to be on the water; we are here. We are together and homeschooling our children in the most beautiful and rare places.
Click below to play the video!!
We began this first leg of our sailing adventure from being off of the boat for hurricane season. It took us 22 hours to sail to Cockburn Town, Grand Turk. After sleeping the first afternoon to rest up from our overnight passage, we set out in the dingy to clear into the country. We passed a large pirate ship as well as a rusted shipwreck on the beach where we landed our dingy to walk to the airport and customs office.
We were kindly picked up by a local taxi driver, who insisted on taking us to the bank at the airport and then the customs office free of charge. Don’t worry, we tipped him well. We learned that he was from Dominican Republic and noted that the kindness and willingness to help of Dominicans we have met is a strong and wonderful cultural trait. After paying to clear in and get our passports stamped, we wandered through town past a wild horse, grazing on grass near the beach. We looked in shops and ate a local lunch of fish, shrimp, pigeon peas and rice.
The next morning we woke to very strong waves breaking just near our boat. We attempted to motor into the protected lake in the center of the island of Grand Turk, but with a very narrow channel with jagged rocks on one side and shallow reef on the other and large waves breaking over both, we made a quick decision to run to South Caicos.
A 5 hour sail brought us into a protected and safe anchorage where we explored nearby Conch Cay, with beaches littered with conch shells. We snorkeled a ship wreck and discovered piles of conch shells made reefs for many beautiful tropical fish. Lauren and Alyssa picked up countless sea biscuits and sand dollars of all sizes from the shallow bottom as well as a couple of colorful conch shells for By Faith.
From there we sailed to Providenciales (Provo) across the Grand Bank. I listen with a smile as the girls and Michael try to describe the color of the water, a unique shade of aqua; a bright beautiful shade we have never seen before in all of our sailing and travels. We even noticed that the underside of the clouds reflect the beautiful aqua color of the water here. We never dreamed that aqua tinted clouds even existed.
We sailed for 9. 5 hours over that gorgeous water to cross the Caicos Bank. For that entire sailing, the deepest water we were in was 12 feet and as shallow as 8 feet. Just amazing that we could be so far from land that we could not see anything but water for 360 degrees, yet still in the calm shallow shelter.
Michael tells the girls that the water color, he guessed, was what I imagined as I dreamed of living on the Caribbean with them. He knows my heart and mind’s eye well. I see it to perceive it; it is the process of my faith. It is the sight to believe in following when God calls us, or when He places a dream on our hearts. It is why we chose “By Faith” as the name for our boat. It is why my favorite verse is hand painted on the center of our salon table. “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen” Hebrews 11:1.
We settled in between the Five Cays on anchor for the night, and dinghied in to South Side Marina the next morning. We met many friendly locals while on island over the next two days. We received a ride to a local grocery store from “Marina Bob”, not to be confused with “Scooter Bob”, whom we rented a car from later in the week.
We stocked up on fresh produce, as we had left DR without, as you generally are not permitted to enter new countries with fruit, vegetables, or plants from another country. We also stocked up on fresh drinking water as we could not use our water maker to desalinate the water on the Caicos Bank. Part of what makes the water so uniquely colored here is the high chalk content, which could foul our desalinater. While in Provo, we explored the north coast, the Five Cays on the south coast (where I was chased by two overly-friendly iguanas), and said goodbye to this beautiful water after a week in the country.
As we left the Caicos Bank, we sailed over a line dividing aqua from deep blue water. It was the drop-off from the shallow bank to the deep Atlantic. I thought about the history we read when preparing to sail here. As with most of the islands we have sailed, the native Indian people of these islands were taken captive as slaves and many others killed; to the point these Turks and Caicos Islands were believed to be uninhabited for a period of time. Many were taken by Europeans to Hispaniola (the shared island of Haiti and Dominican Republic).
Years later, a ship illegally loaded with African slaves shipwrecked off of the Turks and Caicos Islands in 1841. By God’s grace, 192 African slaves survived and made it to shore. Today, reportedly approximately ninety percent of the population in Turks and Caicos are from the descendants of these shipwreck survivors. They are referred to as the “Belongers”. It is amazing and sobering to me. The history we have experienced is rich and often heartbreaking in each island. It makes the experience of learning and valuing freedom stronger for us, and an experience we hope our daughters never forget.
