Week 4: More Underwater Fun

A couple of days after Darlyn and Brad departed, our next guests arrived! Daryl and Sue were boating, fishing and lobstering partners, as well as roommates of Steve's from his early days at Pratt and Whitney. 

Since lobster season in the Bahamas was drawing to a close - it ended on March 31- the highest priority was...you guessed it:  catching lobster!

We went back to Great Guana Cay and had good luck once again on their first day, with a haul of four lobsters.


Lobster tail Dinner for Four!

Yum!


While I love to eat lobster, catching them isn't really my thing.  I prefer to snorkel beautiful coral reefs and observe the fish and other life. The weather calmed down enough during week 4 to allow us to snorkel on the Atlantic side again, where the reefs were plentiful and phenomenal.  We took the dinghy through the cut between Great Guana Cay and Scotland Cay and took turns attending the dinghy and getting in the water. The dark patch in the water in the photo below is the reef.  Plenty of the reefs are close enough to shore that one could swim to them. I saw a school of Atlantic spadefish, a species which I don't recall ever seeing before, and we saw turtles, star fish and the more common tropical fish: grunts, parrotfish and damselfish.



View from Dinghy: Reef off Scotland Cay

Daryl spotted a bird that I hadn't noticed before: the White Tailed Tropic Bird.  They're flying all over the place down here but my eyes were not keen enough to notice the long, streaming tail of this bird and I had thought I was just seeing ordinary sea gulls. 

White-tailed Tropic Bird


One of the things we always look for when choosing an anchorage is a beach where we can take Jake.  The anchorage at the south end of Great Guana Cay has easy dinghy access to a beautiful stretch of beach on the north end of Scotland Cay.  The depth of the water here varies by roughly 2.5 feet between high and low tide, and we found on one of our afternoon outings that much of the cut becomes a tide pool at low tide. This was a beautiful spot and it was so interesting to observe the huge variety of patterns and ledges left in the sand, due to the complex currents.

Stingray in the Cut Between Scotland Cay and Great Guana Cay


Daryl and Sue's visit was short, and unfortunately the wind and waves were too rough to permit off-shore fishing, but the five days were beautiful and we were all just happy to be in the water.






 

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