Warderick Wells Again

We are back at Warderick Wells and are planning on staying here through the next blow which has pretty much come on this morning. So far it is only in the upper teens but heading for the mid to upper 20s over the next 24 hours. Not moving gives us an opportunity to relax a little more, as well as to get boat chores done - R polishes stainless, M checks off minor repairs, etc. We might go down to Staniel Thursday for a Valentines dinner at the YC...

We have had some really stunning days with light winds and bright sunshine. A couple of days ago we set out in the dink for Malabar Cays. The park snorkeling guide notes some coral heads south and east from the Cays. We drove out to the rocks and through them looking for reefy looking spots. Didn't see much at first but persisted, moving closer to shore and then we started spotting some likely looking dark places. In we went and found first one and then many really nice little heads. A great number of them were chock full of lobsters! Big ones! We saw more "bugs" there than we have seen in any one area. There were plenty of reef fish too, notably some nice big Queen Angel fish and some small Nassau Groupers.

From Malabar Cays we continued down toward the south end of Warderick Wells Cay. The water was low - just past low tide and as we approached the southern corner at the south end we found the water flooding through a narrow gap like a river. We were able to go through safely. This put us into the Hog Cay mooring field. We had seen this small body of water from land before and it was beautiful, but from the water it was stunning. The colors of the water reveal the depth, ranging from the deepest blue to the light tan color of the sand bars and everything in between. We went there, in part, to see the stromatolites that are there. Stromatolites are living organisms going back to when life was new on earth; fossils date back to 3.5 billion years. Stromatolites were thought to be extinct but were found again in the '80s here in the Bahamas and elsewhere. Those here are thought to be a couple thousand years old. As cool as they are, stromatolites are not especially dramatic to view. They look kind of like pancake rocks or big mattresses. We had thought we might swim among them but the current was too strong so we used our lookie bucket instead.

Leaving the Hog Cay mooring, we rode the current around the south end of Warderick and along the west side of Warderick Wells Cay. The current vanished and the wind dropped to nearly nothing. We stopped on one of the many beaches, soaking up a major dose of vitamin D. On the way north we noticed a cat coming in and when we reached the Emerald Rock mooring field we saw it was our friends on Makana so went over to greet them. We saw them last at Vero Beach and it was good to see them again here in the Bahamas.

Then we stopped at Celilo for a late lunch (about 1400). We hadn't had enough swim time yet so it was back into the dinghy for a run north to Long Rock. Mike went in the water about half way up the cay to recon and swam south while Roberta spotted him from the dinghy. We found this reef as described in the park snorkeling guide. Once grand but now diminished due to the growth of algae. There are still corals and there are fish but both are scattered without the concentration we have seen in more healthy areas. So Roberta didn't jump in. Moving off the reef and over a grassy sand area, Mike noticed "tracks" in the sandy bottom. Looking again and then diving down, he found a huge conch field. These were old conch with thick heavy shells. The outsides of the shells were rounded off from tumbling around in the sand for years but the inside where the animal lives was pink and smooth. Protection from the park makes all the difference.

What a day!

While up at Long Rock and over at Betty's Reef earlier, Mike had his eye on a reefy area north of the Wide Opening. We would need a pretty calm day to make the run of several miles up to this place. Yesterday, the winds were light and the sun bright so we loaded up and headed north to see how things looked. It was a bit bouncier than we might have thought but all in all not bad so we crossed Wide Opening and started checking it out, looking around again using the lookie bucket. We found scattered soft corals and fish but not a concentrated rocky reef. After a while Mike went into the water and began a swim of about an hour and half while Roberta again spotted him in the dinghy. Once in the water M found several coral heads. In between there were many soft corals and scattered fish, notably many silver and blue trigger fish and lots of large parrot fish. At one point there was a huge Nassau grouper. Perhaps most interesting was the complex underwater topography. There were many darker coral covered ridges and lighter sandy canyons. The water depths varied from tummy tickling shallows to perhaps 40 or 50 feet. The current directed Mike's swimming course through the first half of the swim, the ebb carrying him toward Exuma Sound. Mike boarded the dinghy and we both consulted the copy of the chart we had made and brought along in a zip-lock baggy. It looked like there should be a coral reef to the south and east of where we were so we motored over there and Mike went back into the water. This was much like the earlier part of the swim except there were more hard coral areas and it was more consistently shallow. M swam around until he spotted a couple of sharks. His attitude about sharks is: avoid them until he learns more about identification and behavior. Looking at the book, these might have been blacktip sharks. One was bigger than he was! He motioned for R to pick him up in the dinghy NOW!

After finishing up north we came back down and picked up the dinghy buoy at the Warderick fuel dock. Rick from Makana and his guests joined us for a nice swim full of fish and a pass by a huge spotted eagle ray which glided west to east over the sandy, deep bottom. Too cool!

Love, R&M