Pictures and reflections - starting with Mayaguana.

As we sit in social isolation, we are trying to spend some time going through our pictures.  Our goal is to post pictures from the last 2 months (when we had no data), or good pictures that we missed in the past.  

 These pictures are from Mayaguana, a small outer-island of the Bahamas, with about 200 people living there.  People there are mainly fisher-people, and the coral reefs are struggling likely due to all the human activity.  Despite that, the water was an exquisite blue and so very clear.

 We spent 6 days in Mayaguana waiting out a nasty storm.  We used our very shallow draft to anchor in just 3 feet of water, very close to shore, but still had so much bouncing and rocking as the wind gusted into the 40's.  

 These photos are of the day before the storm started - it was very calm, and we snorkeled the reef closest to our anchorage:
Getting ready to snorkel.  I posted this one because of the amazing clarity of the water and the fact that the ocean disappears beautifully into the sky.
Coral very unhealthy, but look closely - there is a very large school of Bermuda Chub in the shadows.
Note ocean triggerfish in the middle of the school of chub; I love the crazy fin arrangement of triggerfish, and it is amazing to see them swim - the fins go in opposite directions.
Despite the very unhealthy coral, it had a few amazing elkhorn coral formations.
Jack
Fox
School of blue tang
Another pic of the school of blue tang
The rest of our time at Mayaguana wasn't quite as beautiful.  But we still found some things to pass the time.
Kids fishing in the shallows.  Jack caught a bar jack, and as he was trying to get his pliers out to dehook it, they let it sit in the water, AND... (see next pic)
... a barracuda sneaked up on it and ate half of it.  Those darn barracuda.
Stormy morning
View of the anchorage with the storm rolling in
Daisy prepares to pounce.  She loves catching crabs, except when they pinch her nose.





















Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Changes, again. By Annie

Image
Changes, again. We are seven months into one year of travelling.  Whew!  This has been a lot of travelling, although different from normal travel insofar as we travel with our house now, and don't have to pack for each new destination.  After sailing/moving nearly every day between June 2019, and November 2019, once we all made it to the Caribbean, we just wanted to stay in one place for awhile.  We spent about six weeks in Culebra, which we all regarded as our home away from home for that time.  This was interspersed with two one-week trips to St. John (including stops at St. Thomas on the way there and back each time).  This was followed by three weeks in Vieques.  During this time, we also had FOUR week-long visits from various family members - Rogge's mother, my sister and her family, Rogge's father and step-mom, and my mother.  Lots of fun to see family and catch up. As of last week, we are on the mainland of Puerto Rico, moving along the southern coast.  We are m
Read more

Sailing out of NYC, by Jack

Image
posted by Jack Yesterday we sailed out of New York City early in the morning.  It was a eight-hour sail. I pretty much slept through the whole thing except the first and last hours.  It was cool to see the statue of Liberty's front side from a distance.  When we finally finished the passage, we went to a stretch of a huge one hundred mile long beach that is the Jersey shore.  There were huge waves and huge clam shells.  Towards the end of our stay at the beach I saw a dorsal fin sticking up out of the water about 300 feet away.  I started to panic because I thought it was a shark.  When we were about half way in to the beach we looked back and saw four of them gliding out of the water and we realized that they were dolphins.  They continued to jump for a long time.  We don't have any pictures because they were too far away to really capture on camera. Statue of liberty on our way out of the harbor
Read more

The first two days, by Jack

Image
posted by Jack June 24:   It was the first official day of our endeavor.  We left Sturgeon Bay and headed for Green Island.  There is an abandoned light house on the island but when we got there the trail to it was overgrown and covered in poison ivy. Fox found a big fishing lure, and that’s when we started to get interested in fishing. We sailed to Peninsula state park and anchored for the night there. June 25: We all had a good first sleep on the boat (except for a minor drawback of a huge spider in my room). In the morning there were two more spiders, one big one in the bathroom and one in the parents’ room. We headed off for Washington Island, a four-and-a-half-hour sail.  To get there we needed to go through a passage called Port des Morts, French for Death’s Door. When we got there, we took a dinghy ride "from hell" over to Rock Island, a smaller island across from Washington. It was horrible because of the big waves and all the splashing. Rock Island was going
Read more