Jan 7 to 20
My sister Sandy arrived on Jan 9 with Christmas gifts and a bunch of hard to find items we had requested. She brought us lactose free cheese for Steve, sesame seeds for me, water filters, plumbing parts, a new flag and best of all… Christmas cookies.
We headed out first thing the next day. We kept blaming Sandy for bringing the cold weather with her since we actually had to wear our jackets to keep warm. We spent a couple days at Highborne Cay and another couple at Shroud Cay before we continued on to Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park on Warderick Wells.
We walked the trails, snorkeled the reefs, saw hermit crabs, and a 2 foot long lobster. The park is a protected area so we had to leave the lobster behind but I couldn‘t help imagining it in my pot. I would have to get a bigger pot. We stayed in the park for 3 days to wait out the weather and on the third day, things calmed down enough to make our way to Staniel Cay.
We introduced Sandy to the swimming pigs on Big Major Spot. Apparently someone dropped a couple pigs off on this beach a few years back. Now there are 6 of them. Boaters feed them their potato peelings and other food scraps so when the pigs hear a dinghy coming, they know it‘s bringing food and they get so excited, they swim out to meet you.
In Staniel Cay, we met some of the crew of Fair Jeanne which is a tall ship out of Ottawa area. It is a sailing school that is spending some time in the Caribbean before it joins a tall ship race back to Halifax.
We saw lots of sharks and rays at the dock where the fisherman clean their catch and we snorkeled Thunderball Grotto where we saw tons of fish and beautiful coral.
At the end of the week, we took Sandy to the airport to fly back to Nassau. It was a tiny island airport and the waiting area was just an open gazebo. We watched her fly off in a very small plane then we pulled up anchor and headed south towards Georgetown.
On our way to Georgetown, we through a fishing line overboard. As before, we didn’t really expect to catch anything so we weren’t prepared when we did. Steve felt a tug on the line and reeled it in. When he got it close the boat, we could see it was a small skipjack tuna (about 5 pounds). I was so excited, I just stood there looking at it instead of getting the net and of course it wiggled and broke free of the line. While we had been struggling with our fish, our friends on Hum 2 had called us on the radio. After we lost our tuna, we called them back and found out that they had just caught a 3 foot long Wahoo. We threw our line back in the water to see if it had any friends out there but we didn’t catch anything. When we got to Georgetown, Ted brought over a couple of large fillets from the Wahoo which were absolutely delicious.