Exploring Norman's Cay

12/30 - Since we planned on staying here a day or two, we weren’t in any big hurry this morning. We had a leisurely breakfast, did a few chores and then loaded up the dinghy with a few supplies, fishing poles and our look bucket to go exploring. A look bucket has a clear plexiglas bottom instead of a regular bottom. You hold it over the side of your dinghy and see the bottom below just as if you were wearing a mask. It’s great for checking out the reefs or your anchor. We headed around the south end of the Cay towards Norman’s Cut . There is a designated anchorage in this area where we passed several boats at anchor. This anchorage is the site of a plane crash from the days when this Cay served as the base of Colombian drug runner, Carlos Leder back in the days of Bahamian drug trading. There are also a few other signs from the drug days such as bullet ridden buildings and the remains of a “Berlin”-type wall that guarded the Leder compound. However, most of the signs from the drug days are disappearing.

After checking out the airplane wreckage, we tried to dinghy over to a beach so we could walk to the ocean side of the Cay. That proved to be quite the adventure as part of the area is very shallow and we were on a falling tide. We ended up getting out and pulling the dinghy as close to shore as we could. We had trouble walking through the sand and Gerry even sunk in to his knees. We finally decided to give up on that idea and got back in the dinghy and explored a few other areas before returning to the boat. Once back at the boat, we were about to have lunch when Michael and Jana returned (we parted company after Gerry sunk in the sand – they kept exploring that area while we explored other areas by dinghy). Seems that they had run across lots and lots of conch and decided to pick up a few. In accordance with our foreign fishing permits, each vessel is allowed six conch at any given time. They had brought back four. We decided that after lunch, they would come back to our boat and we’d try to clean and cook the conch. We had one set of instructions in The Cruisers Handbook of Fishing and also an explanation from Matt and Gail in their journal Significant Deviation. We figured between the two, we ‘d have a fair idea of what to do. The guys ended up doing a pretty good job and then Linda and Jana cooked cracked conch. Pretty yummy – see pictures for details.

Just before sunset, we went back out in the dinghy and Gerry tried his luck at fishing over the reefs. He caught one small fish and let it go – but he was happy.

12/31 – Today Gerry woke with a yucky cold. He has had it on and off for the past several weeks. We had planned on pumping up our inflatable kayaks and seeing if we could make it to Norman’s Pond (the area we were trying to reach yesterday), but decided against that as Gerry didn’t feel too energetic plus it was quite breezy. Instead we took the dinghy to the beach and tried, once again, to fix the leak that has been frustrating us the past year. We tried fixing it at Cocoa Beach last spring and again at home during the summer, but there was still a slow leak. When we bought our new inflatable kayaks, we picked up a repair kit that was also intended for the dinghy and decided to give that a try. Time will tell if it worked. While we were waiting for the “fix” to cure, Gerry fished and Linda waded out to the reefs with the look bucket and watched the fish on the reef.

The rest of the day was spent relaxing and reading up on possible destinations over the next few weeks. There is so much to see here that it could take years to visit them all – our task is to pick out several places that sound the most interesting and then we’ll make our decisions as we head south, most likely based on weather conditions.

We had a very quiet New Year’s Eve. I think we were still partied out from Junkanoo.