We’ve mentioned the little town of Black Point in other blogs. It’s a nice little place with nice people and a great laundromat, and while it offers very limited services, it does have a couple of good restaurants and they are very welcoming to cruisers. Leading up to St Patrick’s day one of the restaurants, Lorraine’s Café, started coming on the VHF radio a few times per day to announce their special St Patricks’s day buffet dinner. After listening to the “advertisement” for a few days we decided to go over and take part. It started at 4:30 so we had a light lunch figuring that we would eat dinner early and get back to the boat before it was too late.
We arrived there at just about 4:30. There were a number of other cruisers there on the outside deck with drinks and snacks. We said hi to those we knew and got introduced to most of the rest then went inside to get drinks and see what was for dinner.
Inside all was calm, and there was no sign of food in the chafing dishes at the buffet line. Was it possible we missed it I thought? I looked around figuring if we missed it there would be dirty dishes and glasses on tables, but all was clean. We got our drinks and asked when the food would come out. “Soon” the bartender said. We went outside to join the others.
An hour or so went by and conversation was lagging a bit as it was partially drowned out by odd growling noises coming from people’s stomachs. The staff, perhaps sensing possible violence, did start bringing complimentary appetizers and the insurrection talk faded a bit.
By now boredom-driven creativity was becoming evident. It started with improvised bad jokes about the Bahamas, cruising, restaurants… Then, thankfully, someone noticed that we were sitting in the shade of a tree with giant string bean pods hanging from it. We got one of the dry ones down and someone discovered that once you banged it on the table a few times it made a very nice shaker noisemaker. Sadly, the one he got was the only one in easy reach, but the rest of us rose to the challenge. I grabbed one that was in reach but hadn’t turned the dark deep black-brown of the dry ones. I pulled it anyway but it was not a very good shaker. Of course MB probably wouldn’t let me bring any more musical instruments on board anyway.
At this point most of these people had been there for hours drinking, so the problem solving was not so focused. A couple of large drunk men tried to jump high enough to grab one, but their athletic careers were far behind them and all they achieved was to get the rest of us laughing hysterically. There were a couple of kids there so plan B turned into trying to get them to climb the tree. This did result in harvesting one more well-seasoned bean pod. Then a couple of guys lifted the smaller kids up and we got one more. We now had the makings of a pretty good rhythm section, but we lost interest at that point and went back to speculating why there was no buffet yet.
Eventually, well after dark, the announcement was made that the food was ready. We all meandered in pretending that we really weren’t that hungry. The food was great (shrimp, chicken, ribs, cole slaw, mac and cheese to die for, corn on the cob, salad, watermelon for dessert) and we made some new friends so it was another successful trip ashore. But sadly, there was no green beer!
Pigs at Black Cay
Thanks for reading
David & Mary Beth