Warderick Wells

This is the narrow blue highway that marks the entrance and mooring field of Warderick Wells. The blue water is about 10-12 feet deep. The light tan water on each side is about 0 to 3 feet deep. The channel is narrower in real life than the picture shows.

That’s Georgia on the left on her mooring in the middle of the blue highway. Warderick Wells is the headquarters for the Exuma Land and Sea Park - the conservation area within the Exumas. There’s no fishing or collecting of any sea life within the park boundaries. From what we can tell these rules are pretty well honored and enforced. This makes the snorkeling really great. Lots of large rays, sharks, conches and lobsters. Even the smaller reef fish we are used to seeing are 25-50% bigger. Must be a good diet.

We finally got around to mounting our new dinghy chaps. These are covers that extend the life of the sun wracked vinyl tubes. The chaps have been under construction for awhile now. They are made of a lot of Sunbrella canvas and copious swearing. I wasn’t previously aware of how much swearing is involved with the contact sport of sewing.

It turns out we were not the only ones interested in the new chaps. Soon after we arrived in Warderick Wells this shark stopped by to examine the chaps.

I didn’t tell Chris this, but one of the reasons I wanted to go to Warderick Wells was because I’d heard there was a Hooters there. Turns out I must have misheard. The gal above is a Hutia in normal island wear – aka Hooties. This  nocturnal endangered species is basically a rat with an embarrassingly small tail. They devastate the island undergrowth and eat through the rangers window screens and spray to mark their territory. They were reintroduced to the island without their natural predator, because no one knows for sure what it was, with predictable overpopulation resulting.

The island also has native, indigenous whale bones. Chris is keeping her clinical skills up and doing a pelvic examine of this sperm whale. The sign says it was a 52 footer which died as a result of swallowing plastic trash…

At the highest hill on the island its been a tradition for many decades to leave a piece of driftwood with your boat’s name on it.

Here’s a carefully engraved one from the Pacific Northwest. We’re still hunting for the perfect piece of driftwood to put Georgia’s name on the pile.

Paul

Exuma Land and Sea Park

What I should be showing you is the astounding underwater photos of the drift snorkel we did in Wax Cay Cut. The cuts between the islands have a fair amount of tidal current. We take the dinghy up current, jump in the water and hold onto the dinghy painter (tie up line) – kind of like a security blanket in the deep blue- and then drift. Back to the photos, first there’s this great picture of a small gray reef shark lurking over the bottom sand near the reef edge. Then the award winning shot of the two foot wide hawksbill turtle with his massive yellow head and beak, getting his back cleaned by three hungry and cooperative remora fish. The only issue was as I was swimming along I glanced down toward the camera case and saw that the back had popped open, flooding the poor little Nikon Coolpix that used to be dryly tucked away in its nest. Just like cell phones, you are only supposed to wash them every 6 months with fresh water, never with salt water. So far this trip has been tough on cameras. We are down two underwater cameras and one land camera.  You shouldn’t apparently wash the SD memory cards in saltwater either. The sacrifices we endure to bring this blog to our reader.
We sat through a 3 day cold front packaged and delivered from the US east coast to the Bahamas. The trouble with these fronts is that they clock the winds around typically east to south to west and finally north. So an anchorage that is normally calm and secure in the prevailing easterly trade winds can become untenable as the winds clock to the west and northwest. Normans Cay turned out to be a great place to sit this out. Lots of wind in the 20’s to low 30’s knots, but no waves. We headed south after the blow was over. The front caused the water temperature to drop to the low-70’s – clearly below the legal swimming level. Don’t worry too much about us, the water got legal again within a few days. It is now 79*F.

Chris dug out her blowup kayak and did a little creek exploring inside the mangroves at Hawksbill Cay.

  Hawksbill Cay is within the Exuma Park boundaries. They offer a lot of mooring balls to visiting boats. These help to keep the anchors from tearing up the reefs and grass beds on the bottom. There was a good wind and a bit of current when we went to pickup our mooring ball. This is the boat pole, after it got folded in two in the process during the CF of a pickup. It was a less than graceful mooring pickup.

After a quick trip into the man-cave, along with the drilling of a few holes and we have a completely repaired and functional boat pole. This one should last at least a few weeks.

Hawksbill Cay on the West side looking North.

Hawksbill had a set of houses making up a sisal plantation. These were created by Loyalists who left the newly formed US in the late 1700’s and ran the plantation into the 1800’s. One rugged place to eek out a living farming.

This is the remains of the beehive oven used for cooking. The pile of conch shells to the right were also incinerated to make mortar for the building walls.

 

A friendly curly tailed lizard, one of the current plantation inhabitants. These guys walk out into the trail and seem to look at you with a quizzical look – like, what are doing here mon?

The trail leads across the island to the Exuma Sound side, i.e. the Atlantic.

Here you get plastic trash being blown onto the beaches by the prevailing easterly winds, some of it from far away. Visitors to this beach, probably old hippies, use the Arlo Gutherie approach to trash: It’s better to have one big pile of shit, then many small ones. As they stroll the beach they pickup some plastic trash and take it back to this somewhat artistic colorful pile. What doesn’t end up on the beach is, unfortunately, is swallowed by many of the sea critters.

And as was standard practice in Panama, the shoes washed up on the beach are all left shoes.

Paul

Hola, from Carlos Lehder

We’ve spent a few days anchored in the cut next to Norman’s Cay. As Chris says, ‘taking in the eyegasm of the water color.” The cut is a natural passage between the thousands of feet deep Exuma Sound in the east and the shallow Exuma Banks to the west. The entrance has plenty of water for Georgia, but requires VPR (Visual Piloting Rules), i.e. you follow the water color in to stay in deep water. Once inside we have too much draft to anchor outside of the cut. This means that we change direction 4 times a day with the force of the strong tidal currents coming through here. That’s OK when the winds are light. When they blow strong and on the beam, it can make for an uncomfortable few hours.
Normans Cay is famous because it was owned in the 70’s and early 80’s by the Medellin drug smuggler Carlos Lehder. He bought the island and put lots of dollars into improvements. Like extending the run way for his delivery planes and improving the dock. New storage buildings were constructed and over 100 Bahamians were on staff. He was buddies with Panama’s Manual Noriega and Robert Vesco, who had a some nice digs on an island just south of here.

The runway at Normans Cay. You can just see the Exuma Sound water showing up at the end of the runway.

A hangar off the airstrip. Good storage for dead planes, old toilets, washing machines and refrigerators.

We dove a plane wreck just off the Cay.

The story of the wreck is that the pilot was flying in with a loaded down plane full of fresh sod for the island renovations. He decided to do a touch-n-go landing and take off to see how difficult it would be to fly out of the strip with a load of less benign and more expensive cargo. He banked off the end of the run way and promptly dropped into the shallows of Normans Bay. Carlos witnessed this and reportedly shrugged and ordered another plane.
The island was raided by Bahamian police with backup and surveillance by US agents in 1979. There had apparently been a tip-off, as the island was spotlessly clean and Carlos was back in a few days.
He did latter end up getting arrested in Colombia and extradited to the US. His somewhat redundant sentence: life without parole plus 135 years. I think the man pissed off someone big.

The water off Carlos’ dock. Impressive color!

Chris getting her required beach walk on a windy day on the Exuma Bank.

Beach walk shell collecting – actually this one is about 12 or 14 inches across, too big for a pocket. The Bahamian Queen Conchs are everywhere. Every restaurant offers either Conch Chowder or Conch Fritters. Conch is pronounced conk, for you foreigners who don’t speak the language, Mon.

A wiggly ray having a morning swim under the bow of the boat seen through the current ripples.

Paul