Booby Cay

We left Matthew Town and Great Inagua behind, sailing N to reach Mayaguana, a lightly populated island in SE Bahamas. We last visited in 2024, staying in Abraham’s Bay, hunting lobsters and touring the island. This time we headed to Booby Cay, a small island off the SE corner of Mayaguana, unpopulated except for Flamingos and fishing camps made by locals.

We started by leaving the government dock where we had spent about half a day doing laundry and getting as much fresh provisions as possible (well, we included frozen broccoli, as we hadn’t seen any fresh for weeks). They didn’t charge us for the half-day, but it wouldn’t have been bad as they only charge 36 cents/ft/day! We repositioned the boats (with Now and Zen) up the coast a mile or two, past the Morton Salt works, to be out of the docks for a midnight departure. While the holding was very poor, it would do for 5 hours.

The overnight trip was uneventful, starting with motoring as the winds were too low to make headway. As we continued N, the winds began to fill in and we could sail, although slowly in a downwind course. Sometime the next day, we finally began arcing E as the winds clocked from S to SW to W. Waves were 4 ft, but we were going with them so it wasn’t bad. I experimented with wing-and-wing, but settled for a broad reach at 155 degrees apparent wind angle, rather than 180 degrees necessary for wing-and-wing. Sailing with the auto-pilot on constant-wind-angle mode, we had a pretty steady course and followed the wind’s clocking. The strategy was to conserve our westing until the last minute, then turn eastward as the winds clocked W. It worked, but at the expense of a lot of slow downwind sailing. At the end, a squall passed by and we were making 6-9 knots with double-reefs in the jibs. Overall, the trip took 16-17 hours and we arrived at the entrance to the reef protecting Booby Cay around 4:45pm. The entrance was visual piloting required as there are uncharted coral “bommies”, little islands of coral with 0 to 10 ft of water over them. But is was pretty easy and we approached the beach without any problem, anchoring in about 7 feet of water, protected from NE to SE winds and wave.

The next morning I took a snorkeling trip to the closest bommie, which had about 1.5 feet of water over it, in an area of about 8 feet of water. It was full of coral life, soft “trees”, smaller fish, and a single smaller lobster that I left behind. It was also littered with hundreds of harvested conch shells, so very few live conch were about (they avoid areas with dead conchs).

We also saw a small flock of flamingos on the sand spit, so we took the dinghies over to the beach to see them. It was low tide, so we had to leave the dinghies hundreds of yards away, and hop from sand hummock to sand hummock to get ashore. We got pretty close, and took pictures, as the flamingos walked slowly away from us and finally spooked and took off as a flock, circled us, then re-landed near their original spot.

John, Ralph, Leslie, and Tyler (Leslie’s grandson) then went hunting on one of the larger bommies. John got a nice medium-sized lobster and two queen triggerfish. The triggerfish have tough, leathery skin that is sometimes dried and used as sandpaper. That makes it very tough to clean and filet them, but there’s a trick: just cook them whole on the grill after basic cleaning and the skin can be easily removed and the meat is excellent.

Today, the wind will clock E-SE, so we’ll move the boats from Booby Cay’s S shore around the reef to the N shore. This is a narrow path around the eastern tip of Booby Cay, in an area of bommies, right next to the reef with breaking waves and 6-12 feet of water at high tide. The waves breaking over the reef create swells that push you into the beach and the bommies, so you have to be very careful with your routing. I used satellite photos to create a good route through the coral, and then checked that against the depth data in the charts. Even so, there were hand-steering adjustments in the moment. We stayed N of Booby Cay for 2 nights using a side-tied line to the anchor chain to twist the boat into the wind. This has the advantage of getting the boat closer to nose into the swell, which can really roll you about when broadside.

The N bay is also a single-entrance that can trap you if the waves/swell is too high to safely exit through the narrow path between reef and cay. But we read the weather correctly, and returned to the S anchorage on a calm day before the wind and waves returned. However, this anchoring wasn’t as solid, and we drug about 30 feet over the first day or so.

One of the really cool things about the Bahamas is the variety of underwater experience. Every snorkeling location is different, sometimes very different. We’ve dived the wreck of the Lucky Era (not lucky at all). It is shallow, mainly brown, very little coral, and lots of metal debris. We dove outside the reef in the SW area, and it ranged from shallow to 25 feet, with deep ravines and caves you could dive through. Lots of medium size fish, no lobsters. The coral islands inside the reef have usually only small aquarium fish, and sometimes lots of lobsters - 6 or 8 in one spot. I found two slipper lobster and 10 small spiny lobster on one. Lots of soft corals that can’t take the waves on the reefs. Sometimes you get puffer fish (when not alarmed they do look like a cartoon fish), spotted moray and green moray eels, spotted eagle rays, occasionally an octopus (very hard to see, usually hiding), spiny sea urchins, queen conchs, trident conchs, barracuda, nurse sharks, Nassau grouper, margates, yellow jacks, blue tangs, queen triggerfish, ocean triggerfish, French angelfish, queen angelfish, Sargent majors, and one dolphin (Flipper-type, not Mahi). Older reef structures (usually dead now) have tree-trunk sized coral branches forming a structure for a complete ecosystem of life. Sometimes you can find live elk horn corals, finger corals, and brain corals. They are lovely and make you wish you could have seen the life before widespread coral death.

We have cooked most of our fresh food, and we’re delving into the frozen broccoli and corn. Thank goodness for shelf-stable milk! Needless to say, we’re eating a lot of lobster-enhanced dishes now. Grilling the lobster is our latest, and cutting it into a salad. We’ve put a grocery order with a personal shopper that Leslie knows, which hopefully will be delivered in a few days by the Lady Rosalynd mailboat into Mayaguana. We’ll need to move from Booby Cay to Abraham’s Bay, and then either get a car or a ride up to the government dock on the NW corner at Betsy Bay so we can retrieve the goods.

John continues to explore, and found a major piece of SpaceX’s Starship wall. It is honeycomb aluminum, 1.5inches thick, with aluminum skins and an external skin of fiberglass cloth. I reported this piece to SpaceX, but they’ve yet to retrieve it.

Small boat projects continue, as does my learning efforts with Signal K Server, Kip, OpenCPN and Raspberry Pi.

We had a memorable day snorkeling a coral head when Tyler popped up to announce to me that a dolphin and a shark were playing together. I finished securing a lobster I had speared and went to see with my video camera. I spotted the dolphin surfacing for air before I went down and soon I could see the pair underwater. The was a shark as well - a juvenile nurse shark. The dolphin had this shark completely submitted, and was nosing it around like a trained dog. The shark approached my dinghy anchor and the dolphin redirected it. It headed for an overhung shelf of coral, and the dolphin said No, no, no! Every minute or two, the dolphin would surface for air and go retrieve the shark - if it had moved. It was wild, we had never seen such a thing before. Later, when we talked to local fisherman and a game warden, they knew the dolphin well. It seeks out distractions and people.Read more