5:30am was my wake up time this morning and I gladly made my coffee with half-closed eyes and crawled onto the balcony to try to wake up. After a few minutes of my eyes adjusting to the pre-dawn light, I heard a blowing kind of sound on the water and squinted my eyes to see a dolphin diving back down into the water!! WHAAAAAAT????!!! I raced to wake Mike up and ran back to the porch to wait to hear it again - a minute or so later they came up for air!! Two dolphins!!! So Amazing! I don't believe I've ever seen dolphins in nature and this was an awesome sighting! I tried SO HARD to catch a good video, but being animals - they do what they want when they want so I didnt catch any cool footage. This one's ok though - you get the idea - look for the little speck in the center. Mike put on his gear and tried to snorkel with the dolphin but they were gone as soon as he got in. He tried to find swim straight out and find some fish to spear, coming close to a hogfish, but no luck. After a run out to get some supplies, we loaded up the car again and took off to try to find an access to Airport Beach. We drove down one driveway that turned mostly to sand so we walked a bit to try to see the ocean - the area had a lot of sandy cliffs and dropoffs so that wasnt going to work. Next stop was Cocodimama Beach (Alabaster Beach) on the Exuma side. This was super easy to find and OH MY GOODNESS what a perfect amazing beach! We bobbed around in that water for an hour or so - saw a ray, some needlefish, other assorted little white fish and then came home to clean up, since it was 6 minutes from Caribbean Blue. The water here looked like it was a giant swimming pool - probably cleaner than a pool! Next stop was back the the N. Eleuthera airport to get Mike's sister Mende. She was exhausted from no sleep and morning of flying, but we whisked her off to find a beach up at the northern shore, called Ben Bay Beach. By this time I'd learned it was smarter to spend the money and use the data on the cell phone and use the satellite GPS rather than trying to follow the directions my my various books and trust the not-so-accurate odometer in the car. Although on the satellite images, you cant really tell if the road is a paved road or a pitted dirt path until you are on it. The roads we took to get to Ben Bay were got smaller and smaller with every turn...there was a new feature here - a wire fence than ran along the path and there wasnt any dumped trash - instead there were GOATS!! This was our first goat sighting so far! Ben Bay beach was incredible, of course! It was a small little round bay protected by a coral break. It was pretty shallow and had a sandy bottom for about 20 feet then the reef began. There wasnt a huge variety of fish here but there was a GIANT bait ball of seemingly millions of small white fish that stretched as far as I could see across the beach. So many! Also on the beach was a family camping out in a tent and a local hanging out in the beach structure. Besides these 4 people, we were the only ones here, of course. From there we went back to the house and cooked a simple meal of grilled things and relaxed away the rest of the day.
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August 2015
Mike & SarahWe love to travel, cook, eat, own a home and make stuff. |