South Caicos

We had to go into town on South Caicos to ask for an extension on our 7 day cruising permit, because our sail had ripped and we needed to fix it.  We wanted a 2 day extension, but were only given 1 day.  Since we were already in town we decided to walk around.  As we were walking on the streets we were noticing horse dung on almost every block we went down.  We assumed that they must use a carriage of sorts for something still.  We later walked right into a pack of wild horses that live on the streets of South Caicos.  It was maybe 8 female horses, 3 colts, and 1 male.  It was a bizarre scene.  Two of the horses were laying on the road sprawled across the pavement.  We first thought they were dead, but it turned out they were just laying in the shade!  They were not spooked by us or Lucy and seemed not to care one way or another what we were doing.  Preston regrets not jumping on one and bringing it back to the boat to send UPS to my mom for Christmas.

After wondering a little further we came upon some salt ponds that were pink from the minerals, which matched the flamingos that were basking in the largest pond perfectly.  We had seen 3 flamingos flying past our boat as we were leaving the Bahamas and we thought that was really cool, but stumbling upon a massive flock in the wild was really cool.   As we were getting ready to leave to go fix the sail we ran into the local fisherman cutting up their catch of the day…….

Turtles!  That’s right giant sea turtles!  We went over to watch the show and meet some locals.  I was interested in how they go about catching a sea turtle and what do they cook with the meat.  I guess the only way to catch a sea turtle is to jump off your boat and onto their back and hold on until they get too tired to swim anymore.  Then they lift the 100 lb turtle into the boat.  I can imagine it is very hard to get close enough to catch one let alone jump on top of it with accuracy and then hold on long enough to wear it out.  It was also interesting to learn that they eat every part of the turtle except the intestines, which were filled with sea grass.  The even use the shell cut up into pieces to make turtle broth and then use that like we use chicken broth.  At first they didn’t want us to take any pictures of their catch, because they didn’t want us showing to people back home and have it turned into how brutal the fishermen in Turks & Caicos are for eating a turtle.  These small islands rely on tourism and they didn’t want any “bad press.”  We didn’t find the catch in humane at all, and would have bought some turtle meat to make dinner if we had any cash on us.  This community lives off the ocean.  They mostly east fish, lobster, clams, oysters, turtle, crab, anything from the sea.

We soon had a group of local kids following us around wanting to play with Lucy and take pictures of each other with our camera.  They were very interested in Lucy, even though almost all of them had dogs of their own.  One kid wanted to put his hand in Lucy’s mouth to see if she would bite him.  He kept asking me, soon begging me open her mouth so he could see her teeth.  Finally I gave in and let him put his hand in her mouth and he giggled so hard when she wanted to lick him to death afterward.  They loved making her sit, lay, and shake.  When I told her to “speak” and she barked it made them all jump and then giggle some more.   

After we went back to the boat and fixed the sail, we knew we had good weather for our passage the next 4-5 days and we wanted to leave the next morning so we had to get back to town to check out at customs.  We made it just before she left for the day and on our way back ran into some puppies trying to get out of this little girls yard.  She was trying her hardest to get the 2 puppies back into the boarded up yard, but couldn’t get them both at the same time.  We stopped to help and then started back on our way until we heard her yelling, “Wait up guys, wait up.”  We stopped and she joined us for our walk back to the dock, which was on her way to the store she was going to.  Her mom sent her with a list of items to get at the store and I guess she wanted some company for the walk.  She hasn’t learned to read yet, but she told us she just gives the list to the guy at the store and he gets her what she needs and that’s that.  We soon found out that her name was Adricia, she is 8 years old, has 1 brother and 1 sister, and her favorite thing is chicken.  She would eat chicken everyday if she could.  We couldn’t help but wonder if any of our friends back home would send their adorable 8 year old, grocery list in hand $10 bill in the other, to the store, a mile walk each way, and then watch as she took off down the street with 3 strangers and wave as she rounded the corner?  For some reason we couldn’t come up with one person back home that would allow that to happen?  It is amazing how different the people and this island operate compared to our neighborhoods back home.