Elbow Cay

Coordinates: 26°31′37″N 76°58′05″W / 26.526817°N 76.968120°W / 26.526817; -76.968120

Elbow Cay is a six-mile long cay in the Abaco Islands of the Bahamas. Originally populated by British loyalists fleeing the newly independent United States of America in 1785, it has survived on fishing, boat building, and salvage. Its main village of Hope Town surrounds a protected harbor with a noted red and white striped 120 ft (36m) lighthouse built in 1863.

Geography

Elbow Cay is located about 4 miles East of Marsh Harbour on Great Abaco Island. Most visitors fly into Marsh Harbour and take the ferry to either Hope Town at the Northern end of Elbow Cay or White Sound, a mid-island harbour and settlement developed in 1960. At the Southern end of the island is Tahiti Beach near Doros Cove. The Atlantic Ocean runs along the entire Eastern coast of Elbow Cay while the South Abaco Sound is on the Western Coast.

Elbow Cay is between Man-O-War Cay to the North and Tiloo Cay to the South. Lubbers Quarters Cay is West of the Southern End of Elbow Cay.

Hope Town

Hope Town is one of the districts of the Bahamas, on the Abaco islands as well as a small village on Elbow Cay, located in Abaco. Golf carts are the main source of transportation, and most of the supplies for the area are brought in by barge each week. In Hope Town, neither cars nor golf carts are permitted in the main part of town. Only bicycles and walking are permitted. Cars and golf carts are permitted on the outskirts of town, however. All the buildings that are built must adhere to Bahamian Architecture at the discretion of Town Planning. The seat of the Hope Town District Council is in Hope Town, and most of the meetings are held there.

Where to stay on Elbow Cay

Elbow Cay offers mostly private homes for rent. However, a few hotels and inns are available as well; most notably, the Hope Town Harbor Lodge.

Elbow Cay lighthouse

Hope Town features one of the last operational kerosene-fueled lighthouses in the world. This lighthouse was built in 1862 and became operational two years later, it is striped horizontally red and white. Its light can be seen from 23 nmi (43 km) away.

Cay

A cay (/ˈkiː/ or /ˈkeɪ/), also spelled caye or key, is a small, low-elevation, sandy island on the surface of a coral reef. Cays occur in tropical environments throughout the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans (including in the Caribbean and on the Great Barrier Reef and Belize Barrier Reef).

Formation and composition

A cay forms when ocean currents transport loose sediment across the surface of a reef to a depositional node, where the current slows or converges with another current, releasing its sediment load. Gradually, layers of deposited sediment build up on the reef surface. Such nodes occur in windward or leeward areas of reef where surfaces sometimes occur around an emergent outcrop of old reef or beach rock.

The island resulting from sediment accumulation is made up almost entirely of biogenic sediment – the skeletal remains of plants and animals – from the surrounding reef ecosystems. If the accumulated sediments are predominantly sand, then the island is called a cay; if they are predominantly gravel, the island is called a motu.

Elbow

In primates, including humans, the elbow joint is the synovial hinge joint between the humerus in the upper arm and the radius and ulna in the forearm which allows the hand to be moved towards and away from the body. The superior radioulnar joint shares joint capsule with the elbow joint but plays no functional role at the elbow. The elbow region includes prominent landmarks such as the olecranon (the bony prominence at the very tip of the elbow), the elbow pit, and the lateral and medial epicondyles. The name for the elbow in Latin is cubitus, and so the word cubital is used in some elbow related terms, as in cubital nodes for example. The word 'elbow' was first used in William Shakespeare's play King Lear (1606).

Structure

Joint

The elbow joint has three different portions surrounded by a common joint capsule. These are joints between the three bones of the elbow, the humerus of the upper arm, and the radius and the ulna of the forearm.

When in anatomical position there are three main bony landmarks of the elbow. At the lower part of the humerus are the medial and lateral epicondyles, on the side closest to the body (medial) and on the side away from the body (lateral) surfaces. The third landmark is the olecranon found at the head of the ulna. These lie on a horizontal line called the Hueter line. When the elbow is flexed, they form an equilateral triangle called the Hueter triangle.

Town

A town is a human settlement larger than a village but smaller than a city. The size definition for what constitutes a "town" varies considerably in different parts of the world.

Origin and use

The word town shares an origin with the German word Stadt, the Dutch word tuin, and the Old Norse tun. The German word Zaun comes closest to the original meaning of the word: a fence of any material. An early borrowing from Celtic *dunom (cf. Old Irish dun, Welsh din "fortress, fortified place, camp," dinas "city;"

In English and Dutch, the meaning of the word took on the sense of the space which these fences enclosed. In England, a town was a small community that could not afford or was not allowed to build walls or other larger fortifications, and built a palisade or stockade instead. In the Netherlands, this space was a garden, more specifically those of the wealthy, which had a high fence or a wall around them (like the garden of palace Het Loo in Apeldoorn, which was the example for the privy garden of William and Mary at Hampton Court). In Old Norse tun means a (grassy) place between farmhouses, and is still used in a similar meaning in modern Norwegian.