Nassau Town

Nassau is………. well, Nassau. It’s about what you’d expect, a bustling harbor and tons of traffic. Most of the cars are severely dented. Not the bumpers, but the sides. Smashed in completely. Stop signs must be viewed as mere suggestions here.

The local harbor hot spots are pretty tepid with overpriced food and drink, and not all that tasty. I haven’t been over to Paradise Island. Nor do I plan to. The bridge is too high for one thing, plus I’ve found my Mecca below it. Underneath the concrete bridge supports sit a string of colorful funky wooden shacks crammed crammed together selling conch salad, conch fritters, cracked conch or just plain conch. (You even get to keep the shell!) We joined the cue and waited while the chef chopped whole onions, peppers, limes, oranges and spices. Conch is added last, so it’s fresh. It takes about half an hour. Plenty of time to chat up the locals and down a Kalik. Hand him $9 and he hands you back the best conch salad you’ve ever devoured. The afternoon soon disappears in a haze of Kaliks and gossip. The patrons are amazingly friendly. They figure if you like conch you can’t be that bad.

Further down, the fishing trawlers pull in with their catch. Thousands of pounds of grouper, snapper and hogfish appear out of their live bait wells and prices are good. Point out what you desire and professionals stand ready to clean, scale and gut them for you. All that’s left to do is eat them. Something we haven’t managed yet. We’re filling up our freezer while our spears rust in the hot sun. One of these days we’ll get in the water. Just not today.
So here we sit, docked in Nassau, waiting for the winds to die down. (Heavy seas could have a disastrous effect on our beer stash.) We’d like to move on, but we’re cool. As members of the brotherhood of conch, we feel quite content.