First, I apologize for the long break in my blogging.  I have a hundred excuses, that I won’t bore you with.

Since my last blog we left heading back to Manjack by way of “the Whale”  That is the passage between the Atlantic and the Sea of Abaco where it is too shallow to go south on the Sea of Abaco.  The water can be extremely rough and downright dangerous with bad winds.  The weather was predicted to be calm. We had the best passage ever. It was calm on the open ocean and The Whale just has swells.  It was perfect except, I didn’t catch any fish.  Darn.

We went back to Manjack Cay.  Our Favorite! With the winds died down, we hoped to be able to get out to the reef to snorkel.  The last time we were there we didn’t make it, so that is our goal this trip.  We took the dinghy through some very skinny water to get to the reef.  It was high tide and we were  on a falling tide.  We quickly realized we were never going to get back the same way we got there.  Luckily we had the Ipad with our charts on it and found and alternate route to get back.  We forged on with a boat hook aka depth sounder stabbing at the bottom to make sure we didn’t hit bottom.  We would be in a pickle if we took out a propeller in that area.  We saw tons of sea turtle scurrying through the sea grass. We got out to the Atlantic and found the reef close to shore.

We anchored close to the reef, geared up and splashed into the waters of an amazing reef.  It was better than the our previous experiences. Tons of beautiful fish, fans, coral and sponges.  No sharks this time phew. We  saw one small unusual ray just sitting on the bottom.  He  blended in with the bottom, hard to see him.  We saw a sea turtle tucked under a rock ledge.  He was perfectly still but we didn’t want to tell him we could see him really well.  We were careful not get too close, we didn’t want to disturb him. Scott saw a lobster, but didn’t want to shoot it with his hawaiian sling, as he wasn’t sure about the size.  However, when we got back to the boat it was there and he saw him sticking out more and thought he’d take a stab at it..  HaHaHa.  He missed it. Those things suck back into their holes never to be seen again if you miss.

We stayed in the water until our teeth started to chatter.  Sure wish we had thin wetsuits.  We had to heft ourselves back in the dinghy, glad no one was there to watch my “graceful” move with half my body in the boat and the fins flapping away.  Scott somehow did it much more gracefully.

Mallory, our daughter, happened to facetime us about that time.  We showed her the water and scenery.  She couldn’t believe the color of the water.  It was stunning.  As we were sitting there yacking, we could feel the winds kicking up, remember we are in a dinghy on the Atlantic. There is rain cloud in the near distance.  We hung up the phone and got a boogying.  We didn’t have far to go to get to our alternate route, but the waves were kicking up. They were not dangerous, just the type to get us  wet with splashes.  Thankfully we were already wet. We got in safely, but quickly realized, if we wanted to sleep we were going to have to pull anchor and move to the other side of the Sea of Abaco.  Off we go.

Because this was an underwater day, I have no photos.  But stay tuned, I have some coming.

Thanks for reading,

Karen and Scott

Random Photo Of The Day: