BRIGANTINE BAY BITS
by Lee & Natalie Roach
A DIFFERENT CHRISTMAS
This year our Christmas in Abaco was wonderful but quite a bit different in a positive way. One of the attractions to our island paradise here in Treasure Cay is the relative remoteness in terms of access, travel convenience and sometimes communications, etc. This can be a negative factor when it causes loved ones not to be able to get together when they would like (or need to!) as happened to us this Christmas. Here's the story...
A number of our family members had agreed that it would make sense for us to stay in Abaco this holiday season and they would come and visit, perhaps in shifts, and try to put together a family reunion of sorts since they had to travel to see us anyway. Remember we had dozens of folks here for our daughter Theresa's wedding last holiday, so we swung into gear. My main job was to decorate the grounds including the docks and gazebos with the high tech 'twinkle lights' which everyone admired the previous year. The best place to view all of this was on the water in front of the villas, so I took a boat out after dark to check things out, came back to Brigantine Bay and was rewarded to see how nice my endeavour turned out, especially the middle gazebo out over the water. We invite any of you to come by and check this out next year and also stop by and say hello.
Well, as you probably guessed from my opening, none of the family members could make it for various legitimate reasons, but we did have a number of guests at the villas. However, three things happened which I think caused this Christmas to turn into something special. First, we all became like family members to each other since most of our guests were also separated from their families and we think that, plus Christmas time, made it more meaningful. The other two things that happened are kind of hard to explain. Second, I actually felt closer to my family members in their absence than I would have imagined. During the quiet times, I thought about them and what they meant to us individually, with a depth of love which is normally not present when folks are staying busy together. Is that a great Christmas present, or what?
The third and final event tying all this together happened between Christmas and New Years out on Abaco Sound. One of our guests was Dr Brantley Burns and his family from the Atlanta area. Brantley is an avid sailor who owns a 37' sailboat on Lake Lanier, north of Atlanta, and has competed in many races in various places.. For this holiday season he had chartered a beautiful 42' Hunter sail boat out of Marsh Harbour, which I immediately fell in love with. Dr Burns had invited us to join them on a particular day which turned out to be very windy and gusty, perhaps up to 30 mph. Now I am basically a motor boat/stink-pot sailor with very little real sailboat experience. On the appointed morning 'them' and 'us' turned out to be 'him' and 'me'! Everyone else found lots of reasons why they had to stay ashore. As we cleared the entrance to Treasure Cay and headed south on the sound, I gradually realised it was truly him and me'! Not another person, boat or moving thing was to be seen on the sound. It brought to mind the acronym EBAW (Even Birds Are Walking) from my early flying days when the weather was bad.
Brantley showed me many interesting things to do to fine tune the rigging and increase performance under way. I used to cross the Atlantic at 600 mph but I also got a big kick out of adjusting things to increase speed from 10 knots to 12 knots in a big sailboat! It was during all of this action that I gradually became aware of the immense beauty of the whitecapped open sound with a bright blue sky above. I've written before about the grandeur of a mirror-smooth Abaco Sound at night when we stopped for a couple of hours on the way back from Guana Cay. That night it was the sky, whitecapped with stars, shimmering on the calm sea below. Now everything was the opposite, but equally beautiful.
It was then that the thought that this really is God's world, made for us, hit me like one of the many gusts we had been encountering that day. Over the last several days, I had been witnessing the true meaning of Christmas and the ancient Hebrew word Emanuel, which loosely translates: "God among us" or "God is one of us" - and isn't that what Christmas is supposed to be all about, actually all year long? The commercialisation and marketing of Christmas has been an increasing worry and frustration for many people but I have to say that here in Abaco - and The Bahamas in general - we have a little corner of the world which helps to dissolve that blight. Perhaps our Ministry of Tourism folks could somehow translate that into a meaningful message to add to the plus list for The Bahamas. Any ideas?
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