We had a nice walk back to Rachel’s Bubble Bath, where we had an Antillean Nighthawk talking in the sky. I saw on small crab just chilling on some coral, and then another small crab eating an urchin. Still no elusive octopus!
The following morning we headed up to O’Bryan’s to snorkel the aquarium again. It was crowded, so we took a detour and played around on our own private sandbar and island for a bit. When we made it back over to the aquarium, the tide was strong enough that we rescued some teenagers that were clinging on to the side of the island, pulling them back to their boat via our dinghy. That didn’t detract from our snorkel, though! Again with the gorgeous fish and sea cucumbers and corals, abundantly swimming around. We then decided to take the dinghy down to Cambridge Cay to snorkel down there, and are so glad we did! We had a fun dinghy ride going over some super shallow areas, but dropped our anchor on the leeward side of a tiny little rock/island where we had absolutely incredible snorkeling. The water dropped off steeply just past where we were anchored and there were so many giant barrel sponges dotting the bottom. There were plenty of hermit crabs and conchs crawling around the sand, and even a sea cucumber doing his business (making a pile of sandy poo!). On the way back to Two Fish, a HUGE eagle ray swam by the boat. Wren and I threw our snorkel gear back on but as soon as we hit the water he darted away. Bummer.
Tuesday morning has arrived and alas! Leaf has escaped her tupperware home and is hiding somewhere on the boat! It’s amazing how attached we have gotten to this little gecko. She really is a friendly little thing. We were going to head up the island chain, but our friends on Impetuous Too are headed here to snorkel so we elected to wait. We had the white trailed tropic birds flying over head to amuse us. After a visit to the aquarium with Impetuous we all headed up to Shroud Cay, meeting back up with our buddy boat Meraki. And what’s a visit to Shroud Cay without a trip through the mangroves to the washing machine! The kids found a white tailed tropic bird nesting in the rocks, and we all enjoyed riding the current through the washing machine and exploring the sandbar.
It’s time to start our motion north towards the Abacos, so Thursday we headed up to Ship Cay after waving goodbye to Meraki as they left the anchorage first – then frantically waved to them to stop as we realized we had one of their sets of fins aboard. Whoops! The Ship Cay anchorage was rolly enough that we were kicking ourselves for leaving Shroud. No beach to land the dinghy on, and the bottom was so rocky we didn’t think we could anchor the dinghy out, either. Sorry Lily! We did snorkel some of the bommies there at Ship, and were rewarded with seeing a caribbean torpedo ray! That was a first for us. Apparently they can even create electricity as a defense mechanism! Loads of sea cucumbers and dead sea urchins.
Friday we left Ship for Egg Cay as our final anchorage before hitting the Abacos. Our lovely sail eventually became a motorsail. We took the dinghy to what I think is our largest sandbar yet. We had a huge friendly ray, loads of sea biscuits, sand dollars, and we saw someone’s conch farm. I also had the misfortune of stepping on a sea biscuit (they are a type of urchin and when alive are covered with small spines). It took days to get all of the spines out of my heel.
Saturday we did our passage from Egg over to the Abacos. It was fairly uneventful with the exception of a pod of melon-headed whales coming to swim by the boat for a minute! Of course no photos as we were too excited, but how cool to think we had dolphins coming to visit but then it ended up being an entirely new species of whale for us! The cut into the Abacos was flat and easy (yay! So thankful!) and we found a gorgeous anchorage that should protect us from the prevailing winds. What we didn’t account for was the protection from the wind turning us into a mosquito magnet! Funny haha oh no. Hundreds of mosquitos found their way in making for a HORRIBLE evening!
