Spearfishing, Island Walking, Snorkeling Lessons, Sundowner on SeaLight

Allen’s Cay – 2 miles in dinghy, 500 metres snorkelled, 2 conch and 3 squirrel fish caught

I was up early writing for an hour or so when Ana awoke and joined me on a morning snorkeling trip.  There are few things she enjoys more than snorkeling so the two of us left the sleeping teenagers and dinghy’d to one of the nearby islands in Allen’s Cay. What we found was breathtaking - scenes from a Pixar movie with many varieties of coral, colourful fishes, incredible clarity, lurking barracudas, a strong current between islands that was fun to ride, and decently warm water. The only difference, I suppose, was the fish couldn’t talk. I had my first chance to try out my fishing spear and managed to get three squirrel fish and also picked up two conch.

Back at the boat I cleaned the fish and the conch (getting better at it) and tossed all the guts into the water, watching them float all the way to the bottom, then packed the meat away in the refrigerator. After a hot dog and coleslaw lunch, I took the girls out snorkeling while Ana stayed at the boat to work on some Newport stuff.

Young Anna had never snorkelled before, so we went first to a nearby sandbank where you could easily stand and I coached her on using the mask, snorkel, and fins. She couldn’t get the hang of the fins as they kept filling with sand and were uncomfortable but she was able to float and use the mask, but again, it wasn’t coming easy. We rode the dinghy back to the best spot Ana and I had found and Stella and I slid into the water while Anna decided to just watch for a while, and look into the water from the boat with a mask. I was really hoping she would be able to get into the water, but I realized this was all very new for her, and we were trying not to push her into something she wasn’t comfortable with. I think she will get the hang of it in time.

Stella loved the snorkelling and I looked hard for any sign of lobster but could not find any. We cruised back to SeaLight, picked up Ana, and returned to the iguana island to have a walk. We first visited an abandoned ruin of a house, then walked a stone’s throw across the island to the other side which had a beautiful and perfectly flat beach, exposed by the low tide. Ana found a colony of large snails, though even Google couldn’t help us determine if they were safe to eat, so we left them in peace. Stella captured a hermit crab, and if there’s one thing we’ve learned about beaches over the years, there’s never just one. Our sharp-eyed daughter found three more then we drew a hermit crab bullseye racing ring in the sand, chose our racers, then let them loose! The only one that budged was Anna’s, who dragged its shell directly to the finish line, dusting its lazy and untrained competitors, and taking the win. Beginner’s luck, I say.

We toured around the islands in the dinghy for a while longer, then returned to the boat, and it wasn’t long before Stella noticed a dark shadow approaching. Was it a stingray or a shark? I jumped in the water with a mask and was thrilled to see a big Caribbean reef shark prowling the waters, flanked by six small blue fish, his henchmen. These sharks look like the killer sharks you see in the movies – beady, black, soulless eyes, large and menacing dorsal fin, slick grey skin, and perfectly proportioned as it slid effortlessly through the water. It is difficult to judge sizes underwater but I guessed it was about seven to eight feet long. Stella, despite having a lifelong fear of sharks, also jumped in the water to take a look and she was thrilled. Now I think I may have said we didn’t want to make Anna do anything she did not want to do, but we made her do something she did not want to do, assuring her she was safe and this may be the only opportunity in her life to see a shark in the wild. She reluctantly stepped down the ladder, but only after the shark was headed away, and once she had her face in the water, the shark did a turn and came back, so she got a good look at him and was equally thrilled. Despite their dangerous look, I knew that reef sharks are not dangerous to humans, and these are the sharks you can dive with on the specialty shark dives from Nassau. I stayed in the water and watched the shark until it moved on. We wondered later if the fish guts I had tossed in the water earlier had attracted it. Soon afterwords a large stingray also cruised by, making this hottest place in the anchorage for animal sightings.

After the excitement had passed we got busy doing boat things. Ana and the girls started making quesadillas, I was horsing around in the cockpit, and obviously moving too fast as I slipped as I was walking to the swim platform, fell over, and dropped into the water. I had a similar slip a couple of days ago in Nassau so really do need to slow down the pace of my life.

Around 5:30 our sundowner guests arrived – Mary, Malekei, and Nico. We had wanted to also asked Richard and Tammy, but we were up against the capacity of the cockpit, so hopefully next time. Sundowners are supposed to last an hour or so, but this one went to 11pm as nobody had any reason to leave and we were having such great conversations. I was happy the two teenagers stayed with us the entire time and were fully engaged in the conversation, mostly thanks to Nico who directed many questions their way. We had an excellent evening.

We learned Mary would be turning 30 in two days so said goodbye to them at the end of the night, hoping for a birthday meetup at Shroud Cay.

Welcome to the Exumas

Nassau to Allen's Cay - 32 nautical miles sailed, 1 mile in dinghy, 500 metres snorkelled

By 7am we were underway, departing the capital city Nassau for Allen Cay of the Exumas. These islands lie southeast of Nassau and are known as the pinnacle of Bahamian sailing. Most of the photos you have seen of the Bahamas were likely taken here.

It was a straight run, complicated only by the Yellow Bank, which is an area of numerous coral heads, some which reach up five feet or more at low tide, so one needs to keep a careful watch and avoid them. The best way to transit this area is with the sun high in the sky behind you and calm seas. Unfortunately, doing this would have put us a low tide so instead we passed through at half tide with the sun ahead of us, which made it difficult to see the trouble spots, but I slowed the boat and Stella and Ana kept watch. We had no problems.

We weren’t sure what to expect of the anchorage, as we’d read many of the popular ones can be crowded, making it difficult to find a spot. We arrived to a handful of boats and plenty of space so we motored to a clear area in the deeper waters of the channel, dropped anchor, then immediately pulled out the snorkelling gear and jumped in.

Nothing prepares you for the clarity of these waters. My first impression was I could see as far beneath the water as I could above it. An undersea world opened up as I looked to see the entire hull of our boat, floating on top of white sand decorated with sea grass and dozens of juvenile conch, dragging themselves inch by inch with their single black claw. I snorkelled towards the shore, mesmerized with the undulating bottom, waves of sand cresting up and down with shallow ridges, deep patches, and some flat spots. I swam into the shallows and found a line of corals, mostly elkhorn, being picked at by small colourful fishes, unafraid of me. I scanned the area around the boat to ensure we had sufficient depth, and found one adult conch that was harvestable. To take a conch the shell must have a fully developed, flared lip, and of the twenty or thirty I pulled off the bottom, just this one passed the test, but I also retrieved a juvenile to show the crew the difference.

As Stella and Ana were getting their snorkelling gear ready, Stella spotted a dark shape in the water. A shark! It was too far away to identify the species, but was probably a nurse shark. I rowed the dinghy towards it to get a closer look, but by that time it had moved on.

Stella jumped in the water first, adjusted her mask, then went underwater to have a look. She  popped back up with wide eyes, laughing, overwhelmed with this new world. It gave me an indescribable thrill seeing her reaction and I pictured the many days of this we had ahead of us. Ana joined us in the water (young Anna was still sleeping), had the same reaction, then we snorkelled the area together, finding sea slugs, so many conch, fishes, and just after we returned to the boat, a big stingray passed by the boat, so Stella jumped back in and trailed it for a while as it flew and coasted the sandy bottom.

The papaya I had so carefully chosen back in Fort Lauderdale was ready to cut, so early this morning I had carved it up, tested it, and found it so awful it was inedible. So I had cut it into bite-sized pieces for later in the day. We took this large bowl of fruit, four wooden skewers, and dinghy’d to the nearby beach of Leaf Cay and its resident population of hundreds of critically endangered Cyclura Cychulra Inornata, known commonly as the giant Allen Cay rock iguana.

The iguanas were already scattered over the beach, sunning themselves in the heat of the day. But once the papaya on a stick was offered, they shuffled over to us, and snapped up the fruit as fast as we could replace it, with the smaller ones moving quick to get a bite before the pudgy alpha males commandeered the fruit supply. As Stella was holding out a skewer a beautiful little yellow bird fluttered by her head, landed on the stick, and began pecking at the papaya, getting its fair share. These creatures were clearly quite accustomed to tourist handouts.

When the papaya was gone and the iguanas were back to suntanning, we paddled over to the next beach to explore. There, we found somebody had placed a ring of empty conch shells in the shallows to contain four live adult conch – a conch nursery. A young couple then appeared from a path leading into the island and we introduced ourselves. Malekai and Mary were Americans and living their dream on their classic sailboat White Seal, while their buddy boat partner Nico, a Montrealer, arrived shortly thereafter on his dinghy, from his sailboat Convergence. They met while putting up masts on the Hudson and been traveling together since then, much like us and our buddy boat Waddington. Within ten minutes we had struck up a friendship and been invited to their dinner party on the beach, which was to be a sort of potluck, loosely organized around the four conch in the protein nursery, to be prepared in a yet to be determined way. We offered to prepare a batter for conch fritters and coleslaw as Nico had a campstove and plenty of oil, and Malekai and Mary would prepare pasta salad and potatoes.

After an hour of preparation back on the boat, we returned to the beach with our gear and met Mary and Malekai, but also the other invitees, Richard and Tracy, a couple originally from Newfoundland, but long since transplanted to Houston, Texas. Richard had caught the four conch earlier in the day and was the spark for this gathering. I got to work on the conch, hammering out a small section of shell in just the right place to allow for the insertion of a butter knife to slice the small connective tendon which released the conch from its shell. Several folks gathered around to see the presentation of the first conch, a strange looking creature, with its two eyes balanced on the end of flesh antennas, single black claw at the end of a brown foot, and various colourful protrusions, a mouth, an ass, organs, but unclear which was which. I was trained by a Bahamian 25 years ago how to clean conch, and the skill came back to me, albeit slowly, and I probably cut off more tissue than I needed to, but in the end we got a sizeable pile of meat. I tenderized it with a hammer then minced it with a chef’s knife on a wooden cutting board balanced on a rock, with several iguanas perched on adjacent surfaces, looking on with interest, maybe hoping for a meat snack. I offered jelly tubes to all the humans, but only Richard and myself partook.

Once the conch meat was mixed in with the batter, Ana and Nico dolloped spoonfuls of the thick mixture into the hot oil, producing perfect golden brown conch fritters. The dipping sauce we had made with a recipe found online (Authentic Bahamian Conch Fritter Sauce) worked just fine and soon everybody had full plates and we sat on blankets on the sand eating and visiting, trading stories about our trips south, and motivations for them, and stopping frequently to comment on the quality of our current situation in life – enjoying a delicious meal we prepared (and caught) ourselves on a quiet beach, surrounded by peaceful iguanas, under the light of a magnificent full moon, with new friends, in a secluded Exuma anchorage, on a Monday. Yes, the fact that it was Monday made it better.

The conversation bounced around, like all good conversations do, and everybody shared their thoughts, even the girls, who I still think have trouble understanding or recognizing the years of effort and/or tough decisions all these cruisers we’re meeting had to make to bring them to this envious point. But they don’t need to; the important thing is absorbing each moment as something irreplaceable. This was an interesting and entertaining crew – we liked each and every one of these folks immediately and had some great laughs all the way to 10pm…far past Mariner’s Midnight so everybody gets a gold star.

After a quick cleanup back at the boat, Ana and I sat in the cockpit for a glass of wine and my EDM/Trip Hop playlist, which was especially enjoyable with the moonlight lighting up the calm waters as we talked. Ana eventually went to bed, but I wanted to squeeze a bit more juice out of the day so remained up until the song “Floating on the Moment” by Beth Gibbons came up on the playlist.

I was myself floating on the moment and wished it not to end.