Blue Hole

We left Snake Cay (pronounced Key) on Monday and had a leisurely sail down to White Cay which was about 15 miles. The water is so stunningly beautiful with shades of turquoise, aquamarine and indigo. They say that you can tell the depth of the water by the colour, we haven’t got the gift for that yet but we keep playing the guessing game.

  We anchored between Little Gaulding Cay and Fowl Cay in about 9 feet of water but after awhile we felt that we were a little too close to Little Gaulding so we moved to a more central location. We once again anchored in about 20 feet of water and decided that was a good location. It wasn’t long before we had the dinghy down and we headed to Hoffmans Cay with Paul and Phyllis to check out the Blue Hole. We parked the dinghys on a beautiful sandy beach and headed thru the bushes for a short hike up to the location. It’s amazing that all of a sudden you exit the bushes and you are on about 5 feet of rock, which drops down about 15-20 feet into “the blue hole”. We made our way down to the water and were literally underneath the rock that we had just been standing on! I was a little hesitant to go in the water but quickly changed my mind when everyone else got in. The water was really warm and refreshing, it was rather weird to know that there was no known bottom, it kind of made you wonder what really was down there and how big could it actually be…..

When we got out of the water and were drying off we saw a fish about 8-10 inches long swimming along the side which drops off very quickly. Back at the beach we saw a couple of rays in the water and lots of little fish. The ray came right up to Richard and Phyllis! That night we had a potluck on Caper and Phyllis made Linguinne with Clam Sauce, which was very good.

    Tuesday morning we decided along with Caper to head down a couple miles to Cabbage Cay and check out Flo’s Conch Bar, Caper headed out mid morning but Richard was working on some changes to the watermaker so we stayed while he finished up. When we went to leave we were unable to get the anchor up so Richard put on the snorkeling gear to check it out… It turns out that our chain was wrapped around a rock preventing us from being able to get it up but the anchor wasn’t even set… We managed to guide the boat in a big circle to free the chain from the rock then had no problem getting the anchor up. Lesson learned: anchor in shallower water so that you can dive on it if there are problems and dive on it to make sure that it is set also!

     As we were getting the anchor up we had a call from Warren and Diane on Sunset Dreaming, they were just passing our enterance, enroute to Flo’s as well. It was a short hop down to Cabbage Cay and we anchored in 9 feet of water just down from Caper and Sunset Dreaming. Richard dove on the anchor and after a bit of maneuvering we were satisfied with our position. Richard swam over to Caper and checked theirs as well. We took the dinghy over and had a nice visit with Dianne and Warren.

   We had reservations at Flo’s for 5pm and just as we were getting ready to leave a local boat pulled up and asked us if we would like to trade for some lobster, we didn’t really want lobster right then but it seemed that they were out of fresh water and needed some. We ended up filling their water jug and giving them 6 ginger ale and a bag of pretzels and they gave us 10 lobster tails!!

   Supper at Flos was an experience, we had conch fritters with fried snapper and fried conch. Check out the pile of conch shells in front of the resturant! Also rice plus peas and coleslaw served family style. It was all very good but things here tend to be fried a lot, something that we rarely do. The view from the restaurant was amazing and we enjoyed seeing the sunset from that vantage point.

After we returned to the boat Richard cooked up the lobster tails so that we can have them later.