Of Lizards, Rays and Strange Birds in the Night

One of the cool things about cruising is seeing all sorts of different sealife/

wildlife. We visited Allen’s Cay twice in recent weeks-once by ourselves and once after the kids joined us last week. This is one of our favorite anchorages-it’s nestled in the middle of three small beautiful uninhabited islands and two of the islands have large populations of iguanas. We have no idea how they got here since the iguanas appear to hate the water. Lots of boats visit and people take food to feed the Iguanas. Some of them are pretty aggressive and some are very large - probably weighing 12 or 15 lbs. A few realized I was holding the bag of moldy bread and came running towards me! They don't appear to be picky eaters!

While cleaning the bottom of our boat, David tapped me on the shoulder and pointed down to the seafloor. A large 4 foot+ ray was slowly swimming underneath the boat! It is a bit of a surprise when you first see a large black lurking ray, but he was harmless and didn’t mind us following him. He visited us both times we anchored there!

At night at Allen’s Cay we heard birds making a racket. They sounded like a cross between a loon and a crow! We never did get a good look at them in the day time.

We never tire of looking at the beautiful sunsets or the incredible crystal clear turquoise water here in the Exumas. The water is so clear that when a pair of Erin's undies that had been drying on the lifeline fell off in about 20 ft of water we could see it clearly on the bottom. For some reason nobody wanted to dive for them.