Wandering the Islands

[cdavisdb]

A different sort of trip, 12 days, 600 miles on the chart plotter, lots of exploring areas I’d never been to, plenty of very high class diving, but not so intense as usual, lots and lots of very big fish, most of whom stayed in the ocean. The wind was up for most of the trip, 12-20, but the Seafari can run in that just fine and the diving was mostly sheltered. The west side of Abaco was the destination. We spent most of the time along the reef line between Hole in the Wall and Mores Island, with a detour up to Randall’s Cay in the far northeast of the Bight of Abaco, close to Cooperstown as the crow flies, but 60 miles by water. Here is the tale.

Boat was my 25 Seafari, “Someday Came”. Crew was short a diver this year, just me and Ted B., a longtime diving buddy, much better diver than me, and excellent boat crew, from Madison, Wisconsin. Having only two required anchoring to dive, not my favorite style, but it worked reasonably well for the places we went. Ted has developed into a very popular and skilled videographer. His vids get millions of hits on Utube. He claims my boat is famous. There will be some vids of this trip, but it will take a while. I plan the trip, run the boat, dive and cook. Pictures are not in my job description. Ted is great at it, but, with a wife, two young kids, two jobs, yada, yada, he's a bit slow. Just to make it interesting, he brought 3 goPros and, since we had room, a drone, which turned out to be a very cool and useful gadget.

We left out of Ft Lauderdale on July 11, crossed to Bimini. Too much wind to find dolphins, so we went a few miles south to grab some conch and ‘summer crab” before heading for the Berry’s. Both my guaranteed honey holes failed me(first time ever), but we stumbled into plenty of big conch. July 12, off to Great Harbor in the Berrys, refuel and continue July 13 to Hole in the Wall.

Here is where the diving got serious. It turned windy about the time we got there, but the shelter is good till the winds gets south of SE, which it wasn’t, and the diving is all within max 200 yards from shore, mostly much less. BIG, beautiful ledges, bottom in 50-55 ft., tons of fish, herds, hundreds, of dog snapper, most over 20 lbs with a few up to… 50? 60? damned if I know, huge. Blue and green parrots up to 40 lbs. Numerous grouper 15-60, but so spooky there was no chance of getting close enough for a shot, even if we had wanted to. Adequate hogfish and coneys for dinner, but much less than there used to be and much more wary. We discovered that the snapper would come up in our faces if we lay still on the bottom long enough. It is extremely cool to have a 25 lb dog snapper touching distance from your eye balls. Good as it is, every time I get to this area (first time was about 18 years ago), there are less fish and more wariness. Commercial spearos are working the area, but its still better than anything I’ve seen all the way down to and including San Salvador. Still very isolated, we saw only one other boat in 4 days, and he was just going by.

Spent 3 or 4 days (they blend together) diving near Hole in the Wall, then ran up to Sandy Point for fuel and ice. From there north to the reef off Mores Island, some places I had marked before that were fabulous and some very fishy new spots. Everything was more skittish. Where I could almost tickle the groupers bellies in the past, they were so spooky that all we got was a look as they dived into their holes. Still great spots. Tons of other fish, as in thousands of everything you can imagine. A bit bumpy, what with too much fetch and 15-20 knots of wind. Anchoring to dive when the boat is jumping around like a jack rabbit on meth is less than relaxing.

At this point the drone got handy. We took some video of the boat running in a gnarly near 3 foot chop. Eventually I will get Ted to spill some raw video on those runs, have patience. The filming was tricky. The drone would only fly 30 mph. Add twenty-two knots of boat speed onto 15 knots of wind and the drone can’t keep up. Getting the timing right for the boat to interact closely with the drone turned out to be a little beyond our skill set. Typically, in the vids the sea doesn’t look near the size it was. Upwind I was going 21-22 knots, down wind 24-25 knots. Note: all the loose stuff on the dash(lots) stayed put through all of this. Good fun and I really liked seeing what the boat looks like running. You will too, one of these days.

to be continued