You know that saying “You can never go home again”? Things change and/or you change so that upon returning to a place after a long absence (home, an alma mater, a fondly remembered vacation spot, or whatever), you can’t really recapture the happy feelings you enjoyed there originally.

We were reminded of the addage by a couple we met at Warderick Wells, who had returned to the land and sea park for the first time after visiting it about twenty years ago. The vast number of moorings, the visitor center and the increased boat traffic really changed the place for them, and they said “Ah well…you can never go home again“.

I thought I might feel similarly about Norman’s Cay, the first place I’ve revisited from my sailing adventure seventeen-or-so years ago. I’m happy to report that the saying does not apply to me and Norman’s Cay.

Norman’s Cay is the former smuggling hub and playground of Medellín drug cartel kingpin, Carlos Lehder. You can read a bit about that here if you’re interested, or do your own search.

The legacy of Lehder’s reign on Norman’s figures into my previous visit, and I hate to bore you with it, but I should give you some background.

It was 1996. With no good job prospects after graduating university, my then-boyfriend and I decided to sail a 25′ Whitby Folkboat called Saints from the north shore of Lake Huron to The Bahamas (or as far as we could get). All went well and it was a great trip until a combination of too much sail, too much wind and a fault in the rigging conspired to dismast us between Bimini and the Berry Islands. That’s a long story in itself, but the short version is that we salvaged in the heavy seas what we could of the mast, cut away what was problematic with a hack saw, and using a 9.9hp outboard motor managed to cover the thirty-or-so miles to Great Stirrup Cay in the Berry Islands. There we jury-rigged what remained of the mast and hobbled around The Bahamas with only a small jib.

Until arriving at “The Pond” at Norman’s Cay, that is (The Pond is shown in the chart above as Norman’s Pond or North Harbour).

The drug lords left Norman’s in the early 80’s, but left behind cars and beach houses, which made for lots of sailboat-rig-rehab-material.

Over a few weeks, with help from friends made in The Pond as well as a few residents of the island, the broken mast was reconstructed using a carefully whittled porch support as a splice and the legs of a stainless steel kitchen island as a new spreader. Both sets of materials (as well as some lovely glazed terra cotta tiles out of which Phill has since made trivets), were salvaged from Carlos’ beachfront pad.

The mast repair got the boat all the way home to the north shore of Lake Huron, and other than the wood splice two thirds of the way up, you’d never know that little dismasting problem ever happened.

So…I spent some time at Norman’s Cay almost twenty years ago and have many fond memories of the place. I was excited, but also wary of disappointment about going back. No need for the wariness…Phill and I really enjoyed our six-day visit from May 11th – May 16th. The snorkeling was amazing, there’s so much to explore and enough fish and conch around that a couple of hungry travelers could hang out indefinitely. I think I appreciated this visit even more than the last…maybe you can go home again.

Here’s some of what we got up to…

Conditions were still calm when we anchored on the west side of the south end of the cay on May 11th.

We could see some dolphins in the distance and were able to enjoy the gigantic swimming pool for one more afternoon.

We snorkeled, swam and had a good sleep – there was enough easterly breeze to keep the noseeums away.

The next day we dinghied over to MacDuff’s, what I remember as a nice beach bar with a few rental cottages. It seems that it’s been closed for a while, and has new owners who are working hard to expand the resort.

We walked up to the bar where a construction crew of about eight guys was enjoying some Sunday breakfast. We learned later that Sunday is the workers’ only day off, and that they were working long days to get the place finished. They invited us in to sit down and use the wifi.

We checked our email, thanked the guys and explored the nearby airstrip (the one that got all that drug traffic in the late 70’s and early 80’s). We went back to the dinghy, stopped at the boat for some lunch, then headed north to a pier about halfway up the west side of the island.

The house near the pier seemed deserted, so we thought it was probably okay to leave the dinghy there. We walked around a bit, to see if I could recognize any of the abandoned houses.

We walked and walked and it was quite hot. After a while we were starting to feel a little like this poor guy…

There is abandoned construction equipment here and there, like this excavator.

Out of water and slightly overheated, we decided to go back to the boat for a swim. We’d explore some more tomorrow. That evening we snorkled on the nearby reefs, but didn’t catch anything.

We were up early the next day, and moved the boat to the southern anchorage near where it says Plane (awash) at the bottom of the chart I showed you at the beginning of the post. We were excited to take the dinghy into The Pond, the large, all-weather anchorage marked Norman’s Pond or Northern Harbour on the chart. It’s very tricky (or intricate, as the chart says) to enter, but a boat with a 6′ draft can make it in at high tide (s/v Saints had a draft of only 4′, so that’s where I anchored on my first visit). Phill and I didn’t attempt it with Water Music’s 5’6″ draft, so we took the dinghy instead.

Not far from our new anchorage was the awash plan, which was supposedly crashed by the drug lords (some say it attempted to take off too heavily laden, others say it crashed as a result of a Bahamian task force raid in 1982).

It was a very beautiful dinghy ride past the plane and north into The Pond…

Ideally, we would have embarked on our little excursion on a rising tide, but the timing wasn’t going to work out, so we chanced it, and not surprisingly started to run out of water (see the parts on the chart that say Sand Flats Dry At Lw?).

We had to portage over a sand bar, row/tow over shallow water covering some very mushy sand, then were back in business and inside The Pond.

The next picture is of the dock where we tied the dinghy to explore the east side of the island. It’s the same dock where with the help of many friends, s/v Saints’ repaired mast was stepped without a crane seventeen years ago.

After securing the dinghy, we walked around in search of the drug lord mansions. On my last visit, there was a jeep near the dock with two wires protruding under the steering wheel so that you could hotwire it and drive it around all you wanted (you just had to replace the gas you used). So strangely enough, my previous experience exploring Norman’s was by car, not on foot.

Sadly for us, the jeep is long gone, so we walked. We came across a hill which we climbed and took a few shots of the great view of The Pond.

With all the talk of Norman’s dodgy past, you might not have heard that the cay has some of the most beautiful beaches in the Exumas. We seemed to come across one every half hour or so…

We never made it to what remains of Carlos Lehder’s house (I couldn’t remember how to get there), but we saw the ruins of several other buildings, as well as brand new housing development (somebody’s sinking a lot of money into Norman’s Cay).

Because it was still calm, we dinghied back to the boat on the windward (east) side of the island. We were tuckered from all the portaging and walking and climbing, so we went for a quick swim when we got back to the boat at sundown and called it a night.

The next day it was our mission to get ourselves some dinner, so we went snorkeling in search of conch (pronounced like konk).

The type of conch we were looking for is Queen Conch, which is legal in The Bahamas for travelers like us to take (up to six at one time) if they have a well-formed lip, indicating that they are at least four years old and have had a chance to breed.

After a couple of hours we found only two with well-formed lips.

Then Dirk from a ketch anchored nearby came over on his way to clean the huge ones he found. He told us the best place to look. If you’re looking for big conch, look in deep water (15+ feet is where we later found our big ones).

We decided four would be more than enough for supper, and we cleaned them on a nearby desert island (lone palm tree, white sand beach – classic Caribbean spot).

There’s a teak bench under the lone palm with a plaque that reads “For Ron and Aleda …who loved these islands“.

To clean a conch, you tap a hole in the shell between two particular spikes (the second and third crown, if I’ve got it right). This allows you to insert a filleting knife to cut the snail’s attachment point inside the shell, easily extracting it from the shell.

Phill extracted and trimmed the conch (we had no local instruction, so he did what we thought was the most humane thing, and swiftly removed the head first, then off came the other stuff that isn’t good to eat).

I tenderized the conch, which involves pounding it vigorously with a mallet, and made Crack Conch (lightly battered and deep fried), and conch salad, which is a ceviche made with lime & orange juice and fresh chopped veggies (or fruits as the case may be if you’re a botanical stickler), like tomato, bell pepper and green onions.

We were low on water, so we reluctantly moved on May 16th to our last stop in the Exuma Island chain, Highborne Cay.