Lynyard Cay and Little Harbour

We really wanted to get down to Little Harbour, a place that is actually on Great Abaco but not far from Lynyard. We can hear Wellington and Gordy on the Cruisers’ Net each morning as they describe the happenings and weather conditions there.  Little Harbour’s entrance is only doable at high tide for boats with a 5 foot draft or more. Although it might be possible, the timing of the high tides for each day restrict when you can come and go. Our anchor location off Lynyard Cay was only about two miles away so we dinghied to Little Harbor from there.

Little Harbour has an interesting history. Randolph Johnston, a Smith College professor, with his wife and four children, sailed away from the “megamachine” and  materialism of civilization on their schooner, Langosta, arriving in Little Harbour, on the western shore of Great Abaco Island, in 1952.  This harbor was virtually uninhabited at the time, so the family lived in the caves on the edge of the harbor while building a thatch- roofed home and a foundry for Johnston’s bronze sculpture work. The process, still used today, is “lost wax bronze casting method, a practice that goes back 5,000 years.”

Randolph Johnston”s work is renowned – one of his large works, titled “St. Peter: Fisher of Men,” is exhibited in the Vatican’s museum in Rome. His son, Pete, creates marine-life sculptures in bronze, runs the Gallery and Pete’s Pub. Although quite excellent, Pete’s sculptures are out of our price range.

Pete’s Pub is a true beach bar with sand under your feet and t-shirts hanging overhead. We could not afford the bronze sculptures, but we could afford burgers at the Pub. This weekend was the celebration of the 20th anniversary of Pete’s 50th birthday. We waited to visit the pub until the next day to avoid any crowds.

No longer isolated and remote, Little Harbour has retained much of its charm and colorful flavor.

Back at anchor, the other boats planned a beach fire for sunset and invited everyone to join. Another crazy coincidence happened on the beach –  a couple on a powercat, Duetto, said they knew of us from their friends back in CT – Mark and Kim, our former neighbors back in Durham. Duetto has been looking for us. Imagine that – we both just happened to be on that beach on that evening!

Naturally, there was lobster hunting again. Dan and Al spent some time on loud last morning searching the ledges under the reefs. Al did spear one, but the other would not come out of his hidey hole far enough to be properly speared and captured.

Lynyard Cay’s eastern shore is on the Atlantic Ocean so we walked the winding path up and over the brush and scrub growth. Once there, you look out over the rough reef formations, partially covered in sand while jutting out to the water.

The views of the ocean, incoming surf, and rock were quite dramatic.

BUT, there is too much plastic garbage!!  It is shameful what we (humans) are doing to our oceans.

My son, Adam had posted a link on his Facebook page to a TedTalk video about a 19 year old student, Boyan Slat, who has been working on ocean plastic pollution. Millions of tons of plastic kill ocean life and poison food chains every year, as well as  spoil these amazing beaches. Boyan Slat has proposed a radical clean-up solution, for which he won the Best Technical Design award 2012 at the Delft University of Technical Design.  I really hope his idea becomes a reality -we need to do something. If you are interested in learning more about Boyan’s project, here are two links:

How the Oceans Can Clean Themselves
The Ocean CleanUp

There is plastic debris and then there is sea glass……I have yet to hear of anyone collecting beautiful pieces of “sea plastic.”  But every time I pick up a piece of sea glass, I wonder what it originally was, how old it is, and where it might have originated. With recycling there is less sea glass now than years ago. We hope that our ocean is cleaned of the plastic debris, but on the other hand, we want people to dispose of their glass into the ocean. Contradictory?  We don’t think so. The glass is not harmful, and it is beautiful when it has been tumbled around in the sea and sands.

This beach on the Atlantic Ocean side of Lynyard was a good place to hunt for sea glass. Both mornings we spent at least an hour searching on the sand and discovered pieces caught in the rough of the reef and rock. Much of our finds were very small pieces, called mermaid tears, and mostly greens.  We enjoy the search for all sizes and all colors.