Exuma Cays

Exumas, Bahamas
8 July 2008

“Look, he likes pizza!” exclaims Tatiana as she watches the big fish residing under our boat devour what was supposed to be her dinner. More and more pizza goes overboard, followed by red beets (which the fish didn’t like) and cookies (no luck either). Poor guy, he is probably going to throw up at night.

We finally succumbed to the lure of catching our own dinner: we are now in the ranks of cruisers who (attempt to) fish. Not successfully yet, just hopefully. After a search through the various lockers on our boat, Kuno discovered all that was needed to fish here. We are told it is pretty simple – a yoyo with a lot of nylon string, weight, big hook and a colorful squid. Picture this. Day 1: We let out the line, hook and all, and wait. And wait (other cruisers noted that it usually takes only a few minutes to catch something). Maybe we are going too fast. We adjust the speed. Nothing. At the end of the day, Kuno reels the line in and dryly says: “That was a very safe way to fish!” Not understanding what he means I look up and see that the hook was still inside the cork that we put on for safety during storage and handling. Ok, lesson learned. Take the cork off before fishing.

Day 2: Line goes in minus the cork. We adjust the speed and 30 minutes later there is a pull on the line. While Kuno starts reeling the fish in, I go get the fish identification chart and rum. Not to steel our nerves, but to subdue the fish. It is apparently a much more pleasant experience than using the winch handle. Kuno pulls a grey toothy beast in, nice dinner size, about 10 pounds. I pour a good shot of rum into his mouth and gills, while Kuno yells: “Mount Gay? Are you crazy?” Well, I thought I would make his passing a pleasant one, so that he doesn’t get a headache. Kuno and I start studying the identification chart, finding, to our dismay, that it is a barracuda (we think). Edible, but not top of the list. Potential issue with ciguatera poisoning. We decide to throw him back in on the chance that he can recover from the rum. We have pizza for dinner instead. And as for the next few days we will be in a park area with no fishing allowed, we may indeed remain unsuccessful in our attempt to feed ourselves from the sea on this trip.

We are now leisurely moving through the Exumas chain in the Bahamas, relishing the last few days of solitude before we enter the whirl of Nassau, and ultimately the dreaded dismantling of the boat and putting it on a truck in Ft. Lauderdale at the end of the month. While we are not looking forward to the mayhem of organizing the departure, all of us are starting to look forward to coming home.

We arrived in the cruisers’ mecca at the south tip of Grand Exuma, Georgetown, expecting to find a lot of boats, but by this time of the year, especially as hurricane Bertha is trying to make up its mind which way to go, the Exumas are empty and we have many of the anchorages to ourselves. Georgetown was an exception, with a few cruisers, who like us, for some reason or other, are late in their schedules, and a few boats who plan to weather the hurricane season in the area. After days of not meeting another boat while passing through the Out Islands, it is nice to have some company. We stay for a few days, just playing on the beaches, eating burgers in the beach bar, reading and sharing experiences. A huge rainstorm passes through our anchorage one night and washes Blue Moon from the accumulated salt. We haven’t noticed, but other boats also had an orange coating from an African sand storm that blew over us a few days ago.

I will forever have Exumas associated with the color of turquoise. I have never seen so many shades of it as in the water here. The Exuma islands are fairly flat, quite barren and there is very little civilization. But as we sail across the inside banks, the colors of our surroundings are of brilliant white beaches, jagged grey rocks and different shades of turquoise. The photographs can never make it justice. Yesterday Kuno was pointing out to Tatiana that the clouds have turquoise underbellies from the water reflection and she replied: “What do you mean? I don’t see turquoise clouds.” Turns out her grey lens sunglasses filter out so much of the vivid color that she has spent this vacation observing much blander scenery than we have. So now she is living the technicolor dream of brown polarized lenses, amazed at what she has been missing.

A big part of Exumas has been set aside as the Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park in 1959, the first such park in the world. Fishing is prohibited and it shows when we snorkel around here – we see yellowfin tuna, grouper and lobsters meander right under our noses without any fear. We resist the temptation.

We snorkel into the Thunderball Cave off Staniel Cay, a location of another 007 movie, Thunderball, and the variety of fish and coral we find there is amazing, illuminated by streams of sunlight coming in through the holes in the cave ceiling. Tatiana gets spooked by the swarming of the little fish around her, as somebody drops a piece of fish food into the water. Hundreds of them zoom in to eat the little morsel. I don’t know how the fish do it though, but no matter how close they get to us, they never seem to touch. The bottom of the anchorages and bays is littered with conch of all sorts and we have never seen so many baby conches as here. Apparently the concentration of conch inside the park here is 31% higher than outside of the park. It is funny to look at the ground and see the shells move, as they drag themselves along the sandy bottom in search of food. Nurse sharks and stingrays have become a common sight wherever we are, just gliding around us, looking for food. Many nights we shine the flashlight into the water and drop some food overboard to see what creatures come out. A group of yellowfin tuna was particularly excited to get some leftover schnitzel.

Anchoring in the Exumas is tricky, very unlike anything we have experienced before and we often pick up a park buoy instead of having to set two anchors. Even then, Kuno usually dives the buoy at slack tide to make sure that it is solid. Jumping into the water off the boat at any other time is dangerous, as the current is too strong. The Exumas, with its many cays, banks and cuts behaves in an unpredictable way. Well, unpredictable to us anyway. The tidal current through the anchorages is so strong, that on regular basis we hang on the buoy opposite to the wind or sideways to the wind. Last night we were doing 360’s, luckily on a buoy, not on anchor. The tide is important here and we rely on it when we pass through some of the shallower spots, giving us an extra foot or two under the keel if we time it right. I am often on the bow as a lookout, but it is so difficult to tell the depth; the water is so clear that I can see the rocks and sand ripples as well in 12ft of water as in 8ft. Yesterday I was telling our friends on another boat about our uneventful passage of the day across the banks, when Kuno piped up: “Well, actually, I kind of missed the middle of the channel at one point and we were in 6ft of water.” Oops, we have a 5ft 8 draft. Of course, the culprit was the current, or so Kuno says. But the reality is that the charted channels are somewhat unreliable, as the sand banks tend to shift over time. So we sail by looking and feeling and watching the depth sounder like hawks, all the time marveling at the bright turquoise around us.

And Tatiana, true to her style, is reading her way through the Caribbean, completely oblivious to many of the sights and marvels, including the skeleton of a 52ft sperm whale behind her!