Tuesday the 15th was the first day in several that the wind wasn't blowing hard from the south, so there was a general outpouring of boats from Staniel Cay, most going south. We bucked the trend and went north, along with Odyssey and Whish, since we had all skipped twenty miles or so of the south end of the Exuma Land and Sea Park in order to hit Staniel for the pig roast.
We left a little earlier than the others and took the Banks side (on the west side of the cays). This was a shallower water route, and required finding a channel between two sandbanks for the final approach to Fowl Cay, the island where we planned to anchor. It turned out to be such a still and brilliant day that the channel was clearly visible, a medium-blue strip between fields of pale aqua, and we easily followed it in.
We selected this anchorage for two reasons. First, Fowl Cay is close to several interesting places in the Exuma Park -- the Rocky Dundas, which are two cliffy islands, and a couple of good snorkeling sites. Secondly, Fowl Cay is not actually within the park, so we could legally hunt fish and lobster on the nearby reefs.
Before going grocery snorkeling, we had to get some chores done. Britt slipped underwater to replace our zincs, while I did my very first ever load of boat bucket laundry. Then we snorkeled on the coral heads at the edge of the anchorage. The island is shaped like the letter C, with the anchorage in the middle, and the two arms had reefs near them. The current swept strongly near the edges of the C, but eddied behind, so we snorkeled across the heads then let ourselves get swept by the current around to the back of the island, where we swam for the eddy. A cut through the rocky arm of the island allowed us to swim back into the anchorage for another go-round. We looked at the coral and the fish, and Britt speared a graysby and a margate. Odyssey and Whish trolled lines during their trip up to Fowl Cay and caught even more fish, so we had a big fish fry aboard Whish that evening.
The next morning, shortly before low tide, we all dinghied over to the southern Rocky Dunda (I guess that's the singular -- they're just called the "Rocky Dundas" in our guide book) where there are two caves that can be snorkeled. Both have holes in their roofs, so there's plenty of light to see. The southern cave's floor was mostly out of the water, so we sat on the shelf and took our fins off so we could walk around. The northern cave, which had more impressive stalagtite formations, still had a couple of feet of water inside. These caves were not as spectacular as Thunderball Cave, but were very nice and worth the visit.
According to our guidebook, a reef just north of the Rocky Dundas is the site of "a magnificent stand of pillar coral". We weren't sure exactly what pillar coral was, and the directions in the guide were somewhat vague, but we headed over to the general vicinity and dropped our dinghy anchor. By some amazing coincidence, we were in exactly the right spot. It was immediately obvious that the coral columns, a formation we'd not seen before, were what we were looking for. The surrounding reef was also very beautiful, with a lot of sea life, but the current started to pick up so we went back to our boats after a relatively short time.
The following morning the men all went hunting on the Fowl Cay reef, along with a guy off a tiny steel Canadian boat. We women were starting to get a little antsy -- the plan had been to go up to another anchorage in time to do some snorkeling at slack tide, and it was clear that wouldn't happen -- but when the guys came back, they brought four lobster (two of them were huge) and a bunch of fish (Britt got two glasseye snapper, and Jeff from Whish got a scrawled filefish, which he swore was edible and good, but they eat fire coral, so I was a little leery), so we forgave them readily.
In the afternoon we moved north again, to Hall's Pond Cay; It wasn't very far, and I could see Odyssey, in the lead, put up sails, so we did too. In the extremely light winds, we made only about 3 knots -- but Odyssey was pulling away steadily, and Whish, behind us, was gaining on us. We felt like we must be pretty poor sailors, or at least have a slug of a boat, until we called Alex to compliment him on his fine sailing. "Oh, I've still got the engine on." Aha! As Whish passed us, we could see that they too were motorsailing, so at that point we gave up and turned the key as well.
That night Windom hosted the seafood feast. We had grilled lobster and sauteed fish, curried chickpeas and carrots, barbecue beans, and rice, all washed down with rum drinks and wine. Somehow we managed to fit all ten of us (six adults and four children) around our table; that's the most we've had on the boat at once, let alone had for dinner! There was so much food I didn't even cook the legs and antennae from the two large lobsters, so the next day I steamed them with some Old Bay seasoning and picked out the meat for "leg salad sandwiches".
The reason we came to Hall's Pond Cay was a particular dive that the guidebook raved about: Jeep Reef. We had bought SCUBA tanks in Florida, and Odyssey had tanks on board as well. Since we can't get our tanks refilled until Georgetown, we knew we only had one shot at doing a dive, and this one sounded good. Britt scouted it out in the morning, then we moved over to anchor close by the reef in time to dive at slack water.
It turned out to be a lot of fun; not a particularly deep dive (it would have been possible but challenging to snorkel most of it), but with a lot of big fish and colorful coral. The wrecked jeep which gives the reef its name was an interesting sight; it's right-side up and still has its steering wheel and seat poking up out of the chassis, and it's nearly entirely encrusted with corals. Around the jeep were large coral formations, rising up from the bottom at 30-35 feet to 5-10 feet below the surface. I saw coral and sponges in every hue, pale lavenders and greens, vivid orange, dull red, iridescent blue. We saw many enormous lobsters, all of which we left alone since we were in the park, schools of spadefish and snapper, three huge horse-eyed jacks, and several grouper. Britt coaxed a grouper out into the open with some scraps of Swiss cheese. Those things have huge mouths! When the cheese was gone, the grouper followed us around hopefully for a while before heading back to its little cavern.
We swam underwater to our boat, planning to ascend along our anchor chain. Much to our dismay, the chain was completely wrapped twice around a huge coral head. Britt had tried to drop the anchor well clear of the reef; the anchor itself was buried in sand, but the chain had hit the coral and wound itself into a big and complicated knot. Fortunately, we both had some air left. Britt moved the anchor closer, and I worked the slack up to the coral head. We then carefully lifted the chain up from the coral (trying hard not to damage it any more than we had already), which took both of us since it was a large and heavy loop, then Britt laid it out on the sand in a clear path. We both surfaced with barely 500 psi left; it was a lot of effort working at 30 feet. (Now that I see how much energy was required to unfoul a chain in warm water, with little current and good visibility, I am even more astonished and impressed that Britt was able to do this in the muddy and cold Ashley River in Charleston.) When we started the motor and began to lift the anchor, we carefully followed the path of the anchor chain as we pulled it up. The anchor finally appeared, accompanied by big sighs of relief from us, and we motored out into Exuma Sound, southbound again.
The wind had picked up considerably from the southeast, just about on our nose. It was barely sail-able, but we reefed down and gritted our teeth and beat into the waves. Fortunately we didn't have far to go to the place we'd picked out at Little Bell Island (which is also called Cambridge Cay). We took down the sails and motored into the cut a short distance behind Odyssey.
The guidebook directions for the entrance to the anchorage were a little intimidating -- enter the cut, then head straight for the island's shore and run very close to it in order to avoid a shallow reefy area to starboard. The difficulty is that the deep water you need to stay in isn't deep enough to show up as dark blue, so you need to distinguish between the light blue of 6 feet and the light blue of 16 feet, which is not so easy. We got help from an unexpected source: the current. The current was, as usual, raging against us as we came in through the cut, looking in places like a small river with a distinctive surface chop. Our river-rafting days taught us much about the way rivers behave. For example, the best channel is usually where most of the water flows. We simply followed the "river" between the shore and the shallows, then around the shoal at the tip of the island and around into the anchorage, never seeing anything shallower than 19 feet.
We hiked around Little Bell Island that afternoon, and the next day got the snorkel gear together for a trip to the "Sea Aquarium" with the people on Whish (Odyssey's dinghy transom had broken the day before, and Alex was busy repairing it, so they didn't join us). This turned out to be a really great site, a sort of a "wall snorkel" along the edge of a small islet which dropped off fairly steeply but only to 20 feet or so. The coral colors were as superb as those on Jeep Reef, and we saw the usual assortment of reef creatures as well as an enormous school of huge jacks swimming in the slightly deeper water off the reef. Of course we were still in the park, so we could only look wistfully at the delicious fish.