Beth gives the “OK” sign underwater
With light winds and settled weather we decided to move the 4.6 miles to Fowl Cay and anchor just inside the reef. We passed along the shores of Great Guana and Scotland Cays where the vacation homes are very impressive.
Iain on Iceni volunteered to help Beth and I go out Scuba diving. He and Sue are both very experienced PADI instructors. They loaned us equipment and shared expertise. Iain was very patient with both of us as we hadn’t been diving in open water since being certified back in the 1970’s. We had both taken a refresher course before leaving Durham last spring in hopes of getting under the water during the trip. Our first stop we went down and were met by a couple of large, friendly and curious Groupers.
Nassau Grouper
After photographing the grouper we noticed a Reef Shark coming to visit. We surfaced and decided to go back down since he was keeping his distance. After a few minutes more down around thirty feet, we noticed he now had a larger friend so, this being our first dive in a long, long time, we decided to move to another spot.
Caribbean Reef Shark
The second dive was more relaxing and we wound through coral canyons looking at fish that weren’t higher than us on the food chain.
Back at the boat we looked after Fraser so that Iain, Sue and Hannah could take an afternoon dive.
Sunrise over Fowl Cay
Friday we took our hookah equipment out to the reef to give that a try. Hookah is an electric surface supplied air system with a pair of 30 foot hoses. I’ve used it to clean the bottom of the boat, but we hadn’t tried it for fun. Tying the dinghy to a mooring buoy we assembled the system and got into the water. We could just get to the reef on the surface, but not close enough when going under water. Ideally, we would have let the dinghy drift and pulled it along as we swam, but the dinghy would have drifted onto the shallow parts of the reef here. The other challenge was that, without tanks, we didn’t have enough weight in our belts to get neutrally buoyant. We did about 30 minutes of diving and then coiled up the hoses and reverted to snorkels. It seems like it might work better with one person at a time with the two hoses connected to make them longer and the other person staying on the surface with a snorkel. We’ll try that another time.
Iain and Hannah went for a dive while we joined Sue and Fraser and Noah who were snorkeling around the reef waiting for them to return. Cleaned the bottom of the dinghy and enjoyed the schools of fish around the reef.
After lunch we left the crew of Iceni as they wanted to do more diving and we wanted to move North to Green Turtle Cay.
The Iceni Crew heads to Fowl Cay Reef
We pulled the hook at 1313 on Friday afternoon and headed Northeast towards “The Whale.” This is a passage where boats have to go out into the Atlantic around Whale Cay since the Sea of Abaco gets shallow. We were fortunate that the seas were calm and we had no trouble traversing this spot, known for having “rages” when seas or wind oppose current and build into nasty standing waves. Took some nice photos of a couple of sailboats as we motored sailed with just the Jib out over smooth seas to join 42 other boats anchored off Green Turtle Cay at 1635 for the Island Roots Heritage Festival. More on that in the next log.