Nothing Normal on Norman's Cay

Days 58— Strange Things on Norman’s Cay

This is Thursday, January 29, 2009—It’s a beautiful Bahama day and Norman’s Cay begs to be explored. We loaded the dinghy with the essentials: sun block, snorkel, mask, fins, books, jug of lemonade (we’re out of beer!), seat cushions and our brand new dinghy anchor. Pulling the cord on our trusty 4 hp outboard, we’re off to explore this gorgeous Bahama water (which is absolutely as colorful as the picture from our cockpit below).

Much of Norman’s Cay is private and the polite way guide books tell you to KEEP OFF is that they say, “Visit by invitation only.” That’s okay; most of what we want to explore is in the water and we did find a beach that we have claimed as our private beach (see pictured below). You are cordially invited to visit with or without invitation anytime you wish.

As we were spending some quality sun time on our private beach near the anchorage at Norman’s Cay, we noticed a forest of miniature palm trees. Look at these pictures and see if you don’t start thinking about Gulliver and Lilliput. A fellow cruiser declared that those particular palm trees never get taller, but it’s possible that he doesn’t know anymore about them than you and me. Next time we will bring more plant and wild life identification books. Thanks, by the way, for what we do have: West Indies Bird Book from Nancy & Tom and new binoculars from Henry & Fran.

From our private beach, we motored over to a limestone rock poking up out of the water and its coral reef below. We tossed the anchor overboard and John went snorkeling. After about 5 or 10 minutes of exploring, John rushed back to the dinghy very animated—“Wow! Do you think we can just take any of this we want?” His look at the reef showed lots of big fat fish. Also, John had an incredible experience with a spiney lobster—he declares that a huge lobster rushed out of its hole greeting and reaching up to him with his long spiney legs. What a wonderful place this is! But it is not necessarily wonderful for everyone—like that lobster when Capt. John get’s his spear or the pilot of the plane pictured below.

Fellow cruiser says that the plane was one of many that used to fly in and out of Norman’s Cay back when it was owned by a drug dealer. This guy just missed the runway and landed in the shallow sands near where we are anchored. The drug lord is gone, but the runway still exists and small planes still land there for access to private vacation homes.
Just beyond the wrecked plane is the most amazing conch catching cove we’ve ever seen. Fellow cruisers told us that you could walk around in ankle-deep water and get all the conch you want (well, you are only allowed to have six per boat or three per person per boat or something like that). We could hardly believe that one could catch conch without swimming, but tomorrow’s blog tells how wrong we were!