currently at:  Flamingo Cay, Jumentos, Bahamas
current date: 20 April 2005

The Bahamian fishermen refer to the Jumentos islands and the reefy banks to their west as "the fishing grounds", and it's easy to see why. The 90-mile string of small cays that makes up this chain is uninhabited except for the southernmost island, Ragged Island - which has less than 100 people. Huge expanses of underwater reefs are washed by tides coming from the deep water to the east of the cays. Uninhabited islands + underwater structure + good water circulation = lots of sea life.

We are really happy to see that things are still this good here. When we first cruised this island chain in the spring of 2000, there were no detailed charts. Steve Pavlidis's On and Off the Beaten Path, with its remarkably accurate sketch charts, had only been out for a couple of years. This is what he says in his introduction to the Jumentos:

I have a nagging feeling deep down that I shouldn't tell anyone how to get to this lovely, unspoiled island chain.... This is my favorite island chain in the entire Bahamas. Giving away the navigational information to allow cruisers to have a safe, enjoyable, memorable cruise through these cays is like giving away my daughter. Please take care of her.

The latest Explorer Charts, though, include the Jumentos, and on the SSB nets a month ago we heard there were eleven boats at just one of the anchorages. This contrasts with our experience in 2000, when we saw cruisers other than our traveling companions only twice, and we heard from a woman at Ragged Island that there were eleven boats in the entire Jumentos chain. (Of course, eleven boats is a small number compared to the huge congregations at the popular anchorages of the Exumas and the Abacos!) Maybe it's because we're at the tail end of the cruising season and many boats have already left to return to the US or continue toward the Caribbean, but so far we haven't seen another cruising boat since we entered this island chain.

What we have seen are Bahamian fishing boats - four different ones, so far. The typical Bahamian fishing outfit consists of one big boat - the mothership - trailing anywhere from two to five skiffs. The mothership anchors, and two men go out in each dinghy: one to drive and one to dive. In season, they dive for lobster. We talked with a couple of fishermen off a boat from Long Island anchored near us (that's the Bahamian Long Island south of the Exumas, not the one in the US!), who told us that now they are spearing grouper and hogfish and collecting conch.

When the fishing boats came back from their morning expeditions to transfer their catch into the mothership, Britt estimated that he saw close to 100 fish. And that's just one morning's work! But when we went out on our own small-scale expedition, we still saw lots of sea creatures - including grouper, hogfish, and conch. (No really big grouper like we saw at Samana, though, and there were more empty conch shells than live conch.)

In fact, within ten minutes we had dinner and the next day's lunch, as Britt jumped from the dinghy straight into a school of large bar jack, and shortly thereafter a school of yellow jack came swimming straight at me. After that, I went for triggerfish, since Britt had mentioned to me the day before that he was about ready for triggerfish sausage for breakfast. It was short work, as there were more triggerfish than we've ever seen in one place. Britt traded his spear for the camera (get ready for more underwater photo posts!); I just went sightseeing.

We love seeing large schools of fish, and the site we'd chosen off the northwest corner of Flamingo Cay had lots of them. Grunts, gray snappers, and mahogany snappers schooled around the reefs, and every so often a school of bar jack whipped through. We saw several fish we hadn't seen further north, including Spanish grunts, porkfish, and hogfish. (Hogfish are extremely tasty, but also easy to catch, so they are usually fished out in populated places. Oddly, the porkfish and the hogfish are completely different species. There's also a cowfish, which is not edible so far as I know. The barnyard is rounded out by the mutton snapper and sheepshead. I don't think there's a chickenfish, though.)

The most interesting fish encounter we had was with a three-to-four-foot-long Almaco jack, the biggest fish we've ever seen up close on a reef. It came in from the north, swimming straight for me; after it checked me out, it circled Britt a few times. It seemed totally unafraid, coming very close - within a few feet.Then it swam back where it came from. Obviously the jack was curious about these strange-looking "humanfish"!