After our family left Cape Eleuthera, we caught our breath, cleaned up the boat and headed north on Eleuthera to check out a few places we had previously missed.
With a weather forecast that was pretty unnerving - sustained 30 knot winds with gusts up to 40 knots for anywhere from a week to 3 weeks, we decided to stay on the back side of Eleuthera and enjoy the island while we could. If the wind was too untenable, we knew we could always return to Cape Eleuthera, leave the boat and return home.
3 hours north of the Cape, we anchored off of Laughing Bird Cay at Governor's Harbor & spent the day reprovisioning. The next day, we went north to Pelican Cay, a beautiful little anchorage that we had heard about.
We dropped the hook around 10:00 am and immediately set off on a quest for what we had heard was an old abandoned US Navy base. We followed the instructions in our cruising blog and, sure enough, found what used to be a pretty large base.
We pretended we didn't see the stay out signs and headed past the old guard gate to the barracks.
Notice the beautiful view the soldiers would have had from the barracks.
It looked like they must have housed hundreds of soldiers here during the peak of the cold war crisis. Buildings were everywhere and all were in the process of falling down.
From the size of these 3 water and/or fuel tanks, this was a pretty significant base at one time. There were several others on the base, too.
The beach here was one of the prettiest we've seen. The sand was pink and you could walk for miles without ever seeing another person. What a place!
Jim had brought the drone along, thinking it would be fun to get an overhead shot of the base.
Well, it turns out we were too close to the middle Eleuthera airport and the drone wouldn't fly. It knew it was too close to the flight paths. Argghhh!
After some more exploration of the base, we found our way back to the highway that led to where we had landed the dinghy. Notice that the tide had gone down and the dinghy was now high & dry on the rocks!
The sunset that night was gorgeous.
The next morning, we decided to do some beach combing and then some dinghy exploring. We wanted to see if there would be a nice place to do either some snorkeling or spear fishing.
Here's a picture of Samba, all by herself, out in the bay.
When we walk the beaches, we're always on the lookout for unusual things. This time, we found a desiccated porcupine fish. We have almost never seen them underwater in the Bahamas so this is a pretty unusual find and it doesn't even stink. Pretty kewl!
Notice how clear the water is.
We have a 5 gallon bucket with a clear plastic bottom for viewing the water. Unfortunately, we couldn't find much in the way of fish or coral so we headed back to Samba, upped the anchor and headed back to Governor's Harbor to wait out the coming blow.
