We’ve been slowly working our way down the Jumentos chain of islands in the Southern Bahamas, with short 3 to 4-hour hops.  Almost all these islands and anchorages are totally uninhabited due to their remoteness, lack of vegetation and water, and primarily exposure.  They are only in the 10’s of feet high, some with nary a bush.

This whole region of the Bahamas is very shallow with the average depth somewhere less than 20 feet so the water is very clear and turquoise when the bottom is sand.  We’ve spent most afternoons fishing for edible fish.  Al’s has been the most successful with hog fish, lion fish, lobster and conch.  Joe “caught” , cleaned and prepared 9 conch for dinner the first night.  The photo with Al’s handful of Lobster was a gift from the departing fishermen in the background.

We did get an invitation from a Conch fisherman from Spanish Wells to come watch him and his son clean conch on his boat.  This guy is well known on the Chris Parker weather net so we accepted the invite and were amazed at his operation.  They pick and clean about 600 conch a day, all by hand.  They encouraged us to take photos, so I shot a little video to show how fast they extract the meat and then skin the conch for packaging.

DejaVu has committed to coming with us so we’ve been sharing meals and camaraderie with them this entire time.  Joe’s boat is very competitive with Dragonfly, often besting her in some of the legs.  As in most passages the winds are very close to the nose, but these captains do quite well close hauled.

We’ve still managed lots of boat projects.  Jill has been purging all the lockers and Al’s been trashing “some” of the treasures.  We’ve even be caught on camera reading the manuel to “tune” Dragonfly’s TriMetric digital Amp Meter.

Our last stop in the Bahamas is at Hog Cay in the Raggeds.  TheNext cay has the only settlement in the area and the town boasts a cell tower, power generation and water desalination.  Evidently Bahamain law requires any settlement greater than 50 must be provided these amenities so Duncan Town population 65 has all this and a school of 15.

Fortunately our BaTelCo SIM card is still working and we can just barely receive and send email from my iPad.  My hopes for this Blog are slim, we’ll see.  Especially for photos.