The Amazing Folks of Mayaguana

We arrived in Abraham's Bay on Tuesday afternoon and got the boat secured for the weather front that would be here by 9 pm.  We got about an hour of diving in before nightfall, but after 4 days of hard diving, both my legs cramped up, so I drove the tender.

Scully, Ryan & Sam

The wind came up quickly from the north and was blowing 34 knots by 10 pm.  I went out on the bow to check the ground tackle and found that my homemade snubber line was failing at the main splice.

Top Shelf main anchor is a 75 pound Delta style anchor with 300 feet of 3/8" chain.  Since a chain has no stretch, a nylon "Snubber" us used between the bow and the chain to cushion the impact of waves and wind gusts.  If there was no snubber, this impact would damage the windlass (anchor winch) and pull the anchor from the sand.

Fisheries Warden Serving Drinks

We used dock lines and a second chain hook to take some of the strain off of the snubber splice.  Needless to say, Santa is bringing me a professionally made snubber for Christmas.

I stayed up until 2 am on "anchor watch" to make sure we stayed anchored.  It was the first time I was anchored in this type of weather.  Very unnerving, but I finally trusted our setup and went to bed.

Christmas Tree Lighting Concert

The next morning, the wind had shifted to the northeast, but was still gusting 25 knots.  We all needed a day off, so we decided to go ashore.

I rely on a social media site called ActiveCaptain.com which reviews anchorages and marinas all over the world.  Captains make comments on every anchorage both about navigation and what to expect ashore.

Abraham's Bay Restaurant

Active Captain comments mentioned a person named "Scully" who would help cruisers out who wanted to visit Mayaguana.  I call Scully on VHF channel 16 and he met us at the boat ramp.  This was the beginning of quite a night.

Two settlements, four bars, two restaurants, a Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony and a ride in the back of the Police Car and we managed to find ourselves invited to a wedding on Saturday night and Ryan and Sam were scheduled to do a presentation on Spear Fishing for the entire high school the next morning.

High School Presentation

Ms Eden: Principal & Bride

It so happens that the principal of the high school is the one getting married.  She is a younger woman who has a great personality and really made us welcome in the community.  Both Scully and Ms Eden introduced us to the fisheries warden.  He is a 50 year old Rastafarian who also owns one of the restaurants.  He kept asking us how much fish we had on Top Shelf.  He actually had me a little nervous as nobody really knows what the regulations are.   We ended the night playing backgammon at the the Thunderbolt Bar until it closed at midnight.

High School Students

We woke up Thursday to another windy day as the front has stalled right over Mayaguana.  The presentation at the high school was scheduled at lunchtime, so we loaded up the fishing gear and a laptop and made our way back ashore.  The presentation went very well as the kids were very engaged.  Bahamians are scared to death of sharks.  Ryan did his best to convince the student that a shark won't eat them, but after some of the videos they showed on the projector, I'm not sure he did such a good job.

723 Nautical Miles Since Florida

After the presentation, the fisheries warden was waiting for us outside.  He wanted to review the fishing regulations with us.  I thought we were in trouble.  As it ended up, we are going to his house tomorrow night and his wife agreed to cook some of our lobster tails.  This is quite a place!  Next update will be a report on the wedding.  We'll see how these Bahamians can party!

Overnight with Ship Wrecks - Hogsty Reef

We got held up for weather at Great Inagua last week.  Ryan has been lobbying for a visit Hogsty Reef which is a volcanic atol in the middle of the Mayaguana Passage.  Basically an extinct volcano in the middle of the six thousand foot ocean.

NW Cay - Hogsty Reef

We waited two extra days and had a 36 hour window where the seas would be calm enough to anchor in the middle of the reef.  The goal was to dive some of the 6,000 foot walls on the edge of the reef.

We left Great Inagua at first light for the 36 nautical mile trip to the reef.  We got there just after 10 am.  There was a 3 foot swell inside the reef which made anchoring and launching the tender from the flybridge a near disaster.  We got suited up and were in the water by 11 am.  We immediately checked out the coral heads near Top Shelf that was anchored

Exploring the Sand Cayy

in 15 ft of water.  Nothing special there, so we headed for the walls.

There was over 120 foot visibility at the wall and the view was breathtaking.  Ryan tells me that usually a wall's drop off will start at 100 feet.  Hogsty's wall started at 45 feet.  I was thrilled to be able to dive down and look over the edge.  I couldn't help thinking of Crawford Notch in New Hampshire.  This was a lot like that wall, just when you jumped off of the side, you were suspended.  Very very cool.

Top Shelf With Wreck in Background

Ryan dove to 100 feet and started making Grouper calls.  This is a noise you make with your throat that sound like a grouper fish.  Immediately he had Wahoo, Jacks, Grouper and Reef Sharks all visiting.  He took pictures as he made a slow ascent to the surface.

After our diving and just before sunset Ryan and I made a trip to the small island called Northwest Cay.  The island is all sand, about an acre in size, with a concrete unlit marker.  There were hundreds of dead birds, so we figured this was another bird

WWII Liberty Ship - Aground July 1963

Liberty Ship Before Grounding

rookery for some sort of ocean going tern.

The sun was setting as we returned the tender to Top Shelf amidst the wreckage of two major ships and dozens of other hulls washed up on the surrounding reef.  I couldn't help thinking how many sailors lost their lives on this reef, and who was responsible for the navigational error.

Sunrise over NW Cay

We went to bed early because the 3 foot swells made it too difficult to read or do anything else.  We left the next morning at first light with a beautiful sunrise over Northwest Cay as we left Hogsty Reef on our way to Abraham's Bay at Mayaguana.

Spearfishing 101

I haven't talked a lot about my training with Ryan Meyers.  Ryan is the 2017 North American Spear

3 Min Breath-Up on Surface

Fishing Champion and travels the world spear fishing.  He is very much like a friend of mine Eric Steward, who is an professional captain and world class fisherman.  Both of these guys are expert in their fields and are willing to give information away to help improve the sports participants.

We dive three days, then we take a day off.  Those are the days you see when we go ashore.  We dive 6 hours a day, clean fish, and talk about spear fishing and free diving.  This has not been an easy thing to learn. 

1 Foot Entry to Start Dive

First, you have to be able to hold your breath.  I trained for the last 3 months at home doing static breath holds.  My longest static breath hold was 3:20.  My longest dive on this trip was 1:05.  The time difference between the two is first you are laying on your couch completely relaxed, the second you are in the water and moving.  The goal is to "breath-up" on the surface with your snorkel, then dive using as little energy as possible.  This is much harder than I ever thought.

Decent While Equalizing

The second is ear equalization.  As you dive deeper than 6 feet, the water pressure pushes on your eardrums and the pressure must be equalized from your eustachian tubes.  This is easy enough on an airplane or with SCUBA equipment, hold your nose and exhale hard, but when free diving, the air is compressed in your lungs and you can't blow hard to clear your ears.  You have to use your tongue as a piston to move the air in your mouth past your soft palate and into the tubes.  This again was practiced at home for over two months to be able to do this.

The third is having the proper technique to start the decent with as little effort as possible while at the same time holding your nose so you can equalize on the way down.

Resting at the Bottom

The final and hardest one for me, that I am still working on, is when you get to the bottom below 35 feet, you feel like you have no air left in your lungs.  At this point, you are well past two times the normal pressure at the surface, and your lungs have compressed that much.  To overcome this, you must lay on the bottom and "rest" for a few seconds before continuing the dive.  If this isn't done properly, you'll swim to the surface.  Once I learned to rest at the bottom, my dive time went from 25 seconds to a minute.

Nassau Grouper

Ryan has been extremely patient with the "old guy".  He has never trained someone this old, or for this long.  Some days he just shakes his head as I make the same mistakes over and over again.  But when I shot my first fish at 40 feet, he said "now your starting to look like a diver".  That was a big compliment for me...

Yellow Fin Grouper

Road Salt & Lighthouses

Frensel Lens Mount

Light House Looking North

It's Tuesday afternoon and we are anchored at Abraham's Bay on the south shore of Mayaguana.  Getting ready for the first strong weather front of the season.  We dove the anchor earlier today and put out 180 ft of chain rode anticipating the big blow.  Wind is blowing 30 knots right now.  Wind will continue to clock to the right and blow until our next weather window on Sunday.    Then it will be 60 nm to Turks & Caicos and a flight home for Christmas.

Cable for Rotation Weight

Chance Brothers Lighthouses

As part of our Great Inagua tour last Friday, Casper (mentioned in the previous blog) dropped us off at the Great Inagua Light House.  The lighthouse is in operation today using an LED light.  The light house was constructed in 1870 by Chance Brothers out of England.  The light used a Frenzel lens and a 4 wick kerosene flame.  The lens rotated and the flame stayed stationary.  The lens rotated by a gear mechanism driven by a large weight that descended through the middle of

Kerosene Tanks 20 Feet Below Light

the light house circular staircase.  The weight had to be cranked back up every hour and kerosene had to be pumped to the top of the lighthouse with a hand crank.   The two light keepers were very busy all night.

I mentioned the Morton Salt Operation that produces the road salt used all along the USA East Coast.  The operation pumps 500 thousand gallons of salt water ever day into canals that move the water for 30 months through various very shallow salt ponds.  These salt ponds take up about half of the island and on a sunny day, clouds form from the water evaporating.  As the water evaporates, the salt concentration gets higher and after two and a half years, the salt is concentrated enough to drain to a processing pond.  Pumps drain the pond, then once the pond is dry, they use a road grader to pile the salt in long rows, then a harvester is used to load mining trucks to bring it to the salt pile you see in the picture.

Road Salt Headed for Massachusetts

It took them 5 days to load the salt ship, but it left Saturday night, and the workers were off for Sunday, so we decided to dive around the piers.  I got  the biggest lobster of the trip right off of
the platform.

We finally got our weather window Monday morning and off to The largest ships graveyard in the Bahamas:  Hogstay Reef.

Pink Flamingos Fly Over Dikes on a Morton Salt Pond

Big Lobster off the Morton's Plant

Sam Scouting a World Record Black Jack

How Am I Doing?

Sam"s Flamingo Pose

I’ve been talking to a lot of folks over the last few days via Satellite Phone.  Anyone who wants to call and catch up can reach me on the boat at 781-384-5006.  Phone is usually on between 7am and 10am and then at night from 4pm until we go to bed around 9pm.

Casper:  The Park Warden

Folks are asking how I am doing, so I thought I’d take a moment to give you some insight.  Here is an example.  I called the Bahamas National Trust Warden for Great Inagua and asked him if he would give us a tour or the national park.  He’s not too busy, so he met us at 9 am yesterday.  Great Inagua is the breeding ground for the Pink Flamingo and he is the warden trying to keep the locals from killing them.  I guess they taste like chicken.

Jim's Flamingo Pose???

As our tour got to lunchtime, we stopped at his aunt’s restaurant.  There was a big sign that says “Ice Coffee Available”.  We were all thirsty and an ice coffee sounded great.  I said, “We’ll have 4 ice coffees”.  The aunt said, “No ice coffee today”.  We all looked at each other and laughed as there was a coffee maker, coffee and an ice maker all sitting right on the counter behind her.

This story explains the last 6 weeks on the boat.  We are so used to running at 60 miles per hour, we expect great service, we produce great things, but our stress levels match the speedometer.  There is a reason we have the greatest economy on earth.

Flamingos Just Starting to Breed

Down here, if they don’t feel like doing something, it just doesn’t get done….period.  There are more houses in these islands that are half finished, none are insured, and there is no real estate value for houses on most of these islands.  Long Island, one of the more progressive islands in the Southern Bahamas, has not had a house sell for the last 28 months.  If you own land or a building, you may have got it from your family, but it has no liquid value.

So how have I made the adjustment to this culture?  Great question…

Salt Pond Has 50k Flamingos in 2 weeks

At first I felt like I was on vacation, so you didn’t think about it, but now I’m pulled in two directions.  Most Bahamians have nothing, but they don’t have any initiative to make something of their lives.  There are a few industrious ones.  They are the ones that own the fishing boats or have some sort of government appointment.  The rest seem to do nothing, have nothing, but are the happiest and nicest people I have ever met.  This experience has definitely shown me another side of the human race and it's not a bad one.

I don’t think I could make the transition at this point in my life, but those happy & giggling school kids, in their uniforms, that were in the aunt’s restaurant (she provided the school lunch) don’t really have it that bad…At least by their standards.

Sometimes You Find a Gem: Cay Verde

Top Shelf"s Track from Florida  - 536 nautical miles

As we left the sad remains of Ragged Island, we set our sites on an overnight passage to the south east and Great Inagua Island.  We hope this island will have a better economy which we believe it will as this is the source or Morton Salts raw materials.

I'm sitting here at anchor in the NW corner of the island.  We are anchored "Bahama Style" with

Cay Verde - Flat Calm

anchors both front and rear as we are trying to keep the anchor chain from tangling on the coral heads that surround us.  We are literally 30 yards from the shore.  So close that we were worried about bugs from the mangroves.  None so far.

On our trip here yesterday, Ryan had found a tiny island 50 miles off shore from Ragged Island when looking at Google Earth.  Ryan finds most of our fishing spots by studying the surrounding areas for reef formations.  Not just any reef, there are specific things he looks for in the reef.  He can tell me what fish will be there days before we go.He does this for tournaments all over the

Frigate Birds - Cay Verde

world.  You can see by past blog pictures, finding fish with this research works.

The tiny island he found has a name:  Cay Verde.  It is a tiny island that looked to have a beach.  No mention of this in any cruising guide and it barely shows up on navigational charts.  But it was there, and if the conditions were right, we were going to explore above and below the water.

Cay Verde - North Shore

We left Ragged Island with east winds at 10 kts gusting to 15 kts.  In addition, we had a 3-4 foot swell from weather to our east.  As we left the Ragged Island Cut, we gave ourselves 20% chance of anchoring at Cay Verde.

As the morning went on, the winds calmed and 30 minutes before we arrived the ocean went flat calm, I mean like a lake.  Still had 1 foot swells, but not a breath of air.

Ryan Leading the Hike

We slowly approached the beach with Top Shelf at slower than coasting.  We had no tender in the water to look for a path between the coral heads.  We had put the tender on the roof for the long overnight trip, and we would launch it only if we could anchor.  The water here was the clearest I had ever seen and Ryan said it may be the clearest water in the world.

We made it through the coral heads and found sand right off the beach.  There was no current and the anchor dropped like a stone.  We let out 5:1 scope, set the anchor, launched the tender and off we went.

Alfred Hitchcock - The Birds

I had told Ryan that if we were able to fish here, I would drive the tender and Sam and Ryan would fish.  This was Ryan's chance to fish blue water.  150 foot drop off were the pelagic fish like Wahoo roam.

Ryan set out the teasers and attracted two Wahoo, but they never got close enough for a shot.

At 3:30, we were out of the water, made a quick change to hiking gear, and Sam dropped us on the
beach to explore.  The island was about 100 feet high and this was obviously a nesting place for Frigate Birds.  We had been seeing these birds from as far out as 10 miles hunting the waters off of the island.  We were about to get a big surprise.

Frigates Nesting

As we climbed the hill, we found a very unique green plant along with knee high cactus.  At the top of the hill was the nesting place for the frigate birds.  Hundreds, possibly a thousand birds were in the area.  I asked Ryan if he had ever seen Alfred Hichcock's thriller "The Birds".  He had no idea what I was talking about.  I was in the movie right now!

We got close enough for some of the mama birds to leave the nest so we could see the eggs.  The camera is zoomed in as we didn't want to disturb anything.  After a few minutes, it was  4:35 and we had to get past the coral heads by sundown, or we would be stuck there for the night. 

My Favorite Pic

We got back to shore, Sam picked us up in the tender, we loaded it on the top deck, raised anchor and outside the coral heads on our way to Great Inagua by the time the sun touched the horizon.

Softest Beach Sand Ever

How long will these footsteps be there?

Remote Spearfishing at Ragged Island

Sitting on anchor at Hog Cay just north of Ragged Island and 60 miles from Cuba.  We visited Ragged Island today and saw the devastation from Hurricane Irma.  Amazing how the Bahamian

Ragged Island Town Hall

Gov't offers no help to these outer islands. 

We left Flying Fish Marina in Long Island Thursday Nov 29th and decided to move south through the Jumentos.  Big change from the original plan.  We got some information from the president of Head Hunter Spear Fishing who had been to the Jumentos a few years ago.  He reported lots of lobster, Grouper and Hog Fish. 

Sam with the Pole Spears

We were ahead of schedule due to the last front, so we decided to give it a go.  We anchored at Raccoon Cay as there were deep cuts on each end of the island that were perfect for drift dives.   Ryan wanted a night dive, so I took him is the dingy and he got 13 lobster in 20 minutes.  He lost his spear in a hole so he caught the last 10 by hand in 35 ft of water.

Grouper & Hog Fish

The next day the 3 of us went in the dingy.  Sam and I switched off driving while Ryan and the other dove.  I was just starting to get comfortable in the water making dives from 25 to 35 feet, then chasing Nassau Grouper or Hog Fish.  Just a little advice, Hog Fish are the best tasting fish ever.  You'll never see them in the stores up north, but they taste much better than Grouper.

We stayed at Raccoon for 3 nights then moved here today.  Just amazing how folks can live in the conditions they have since the hurricane.  There was 200 folks here, now they are down to 60 as no one is rebuilding.  The remaining men were all out fishing and the women we talked with in the town were the nicest folks.  It was like a ghost town.  Very sad.

Case of O'Doul's on Long Island

We met two boats in the new anchorage at Hog Cay so we went to visit.  A single German and a

Ragged Island

husband and wife from Scotland.  They spend the winter's down here every year.  Very laid back.  They were  totally  against going to the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.  He said you need to do it once, then you will stay in the Bahamas.  I'll be collecting more opinions

Houses with No Roofs on Main St.

Onto a 1 acre cay in the Crooked Island Passage called Cay Verde for some spear fishing, then an all night slow cruise to arrive at Great Inagua at sunrise Wednesday morning.  We plan to spend as much as a week there.  This island is the operational island for Morton Salt Company.  Should be a big change from these sad condition at Ragged Island. 

Next blog may be the story of our night with Bobby at Rum Cay.  A book is being written about him.  A modern day Bahamian legend that the entire country has heard of...