This (the picture above) is our latest anchorage as of today, Wednesday July 28. It’s on the island of Great Guana Cay. I took this photo about an hour ago from the beach-front restaurant where Judie and I had dinner tonight. We left our previous anchorage this morning and moved over to this new island this afternoon.
One really cool thing we discovered upon arrival is that this place has wireless internet that’s strong enough to reach all the way out to where we’re anchored. As I type this I’m sitting on the boat, relatively far from land, and yet I can get access to the internet via wireless connection. I've marked in the photo which boat is ours so that you can see how far from shore the boat is anchored. (We couldn’t get any closer because the water is too shallow closer in.) And yet we can get a wireless internet connection from here. Amazing.
Yesterday we had an adventure worth describing to you. We found out that it's best not to put too much trust in the dingy, or at least not its outboard motor. What happened was that we used the dingy to travel several miles away from where we had our big boat (Life) anchored. We went to a spot where the snorkeling was absolutely phenomenal but it’s a place where you can’t take a big boat like the Life. There are too many reefs and corals just barely under the surface of the water and not enough room to safely maneuver a big boat. So we went there by using our dingy even though it was a far distance from where Life was anchored.
After we'd enjoyed several hours of truly incredible snorkeling (the best I’ve ever seen anywhere in the world), we started up the little outboard engine on the dingy, headed back, and all of the sudden the engine dies. Completely dead. Nothing will restart it. It wasn’t out of gas, because we’d brought extra and had refilled it before starting the return trip. So there we were, miles away from our boat and to get back we had to cross a large gap between two islands where there's a strong current that could carry us out to sea if we couldn't move fast enough. And without our outboard engine we couldn't move fast enough. We had oars so we could theoretically row back to the boat, but we wouldn’t be able to cross that one dangerous spot fast enough to avoid being carried out to sea by the current.
Luckily we had thought to bring a handheld radio with us just in case of this type of emergency and so we were able to call for assistance. A very kind lady named “Mama Wendy” had her marine radio on even though she lives on land. (Apparently lots of people here use the marine band radios to communicate even if they aren’t boaters.) Mama Wendy called one of her relatives who has a boat. They came and got us and pulled our dingy back to a dock near her house. Her husband is a mechanic and he took our outboard engine apart, found the problem and fixed it.
It was a little dicey there for a while, but in the end everything turned out well and we made friends with some very nice people here.
All of that happened while we were anchored at the island where we’ve been for the past three days but we were incommunicado because of no internet access. That island is called Man-O-War Cay. While we were there we did lots of snorkeling, including two trips (on two separate days) to the place I described above. That place is such an incredible snorkeling location that it’s been designated as a Bahamas National Underwater Preserve. (It’s called the “Fowl Cay Preserve”.) The government monitors it closely to make sure that nobody takes any fish, corral, or disturbs things in any way. In fact, a ranger drove up to us in his boat one time and checked us over to make sure that we hadn’t broken the rules while we were there. The first time we went there we got back without incident. It was the second time there that we had our little adventure that I told you about above.
While we were at Man-O-War Cay we also had some very nice meals. Here’s a picture of me grilling some hamburgers and brats on the grill attached to the back of our boat. They sure tasted wonderful after a long hard day of snorkeling and exploring.
We also explored and swam at some very pretty beaches. Here’s a picture of one of them.
So now we’re at yet another island. We didn’t really do any exploring today… just went ashore and had dinner at the restaurant where I took the first picture shown above. Tomorrow we’ll do more exploring of this new island.
Well that’s enough chatter for one blog post.
Talk to ya later,
Doug
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