George Town Bahamas 1

On Sunday morning (14 April) we had a brief look around town to find the SCUBA diving shop so that we knew where we’d be able to get our tanks filled and started doing a little research on potential diving sites.  That research highlighted that a couple of the sites were more suited to snorkelling than SCUBA diving and so we headed out with Lars and Suzanne to see what we could find.

We whizzed out in our dinghies in formation to a couple of enclosed hurricane holes on the southwest side of Stocking Island. Here we tied to a buoy and jumped overboard to look for a couple of blue holes.

Blue holes are marine caverns or sinkholes formed by erosion during the ice ages when the water level was lower. The first one was easy to find, close to Wendell’s Dock, and the entrance was only a few metres underwater – perfect for snorkelling down to, albeit with a little caution.  Blue holes often lead to extensive tunnel systems with strong tidal flows and we didn’t want to be swept into an underwater tunnel system.

Diving down to the entrance we could definitely feel a gentle current and, perhaps because of that, the water clarity was not as good as we had hoped for.  Lots of fish had taken up residence in the cavern entrance, presumably loitering for food carried in by the current.  It didn’t take long to exhaust the potential of this snorkelling site and so we went in search of the other blue hole in the bay.

It took a short while but we did find it.  The cavern entrance was in the deeper water in the centre of the bay and whilst it didn’t seem to have the same fish population loitering in its entrance, we were thrilled to spot a formation of 4 eagle rays swimming past.  Following them dominated the rest of our snorkelling time here.

Unfortunately, the murky water didn’t help in spotting or photographing the eagle rays.

Snorkelling completed we decided that it was time to head back to the yachts but only after a team photo or 2.

Back at the boats we saw that we had been joined by a frequent local visitor – a female dolphin which we had seen earlier in the day swimming with another yacht’s crew.  Apparently, she is very friendly and spends a lot of time in the anchorage.

Susanne, in particular, was keen to swim with her and was the first of us into the water to join the dolphin.

It was an amazing experience, swimming with a wild dolphin who was quite relaxed about spending time in close proximity to humans.

She was totally at ease with us, coming up nearly nose to nose [Ed: or nose to camera lens!] with us.

Yes, we really did have this wild-dolphin swimming experience this close to the boats

It was just an amazing experience and was the highlight of the day.

We must have played with the dolphin for the best part of an hour.  She was definitely showing us things such as how to search for food by pushing her beak into the soft sand.  She also regularly lay in the seabed and seemed to like it when we tried to go down to the same level; our buoyancy, however, made it a little tricky to lie on the seabed in quite the same way as she did.

To see if she was really beamed into what we were doing we did twists and turns and she copied us…. 

….and then we copied her lying on the bottom.  It was great fun but, eventually, we felt that we should get out and give her the space to go and see other swimmers.  It was a shame to get out of the water as it had been such a fantastic experience.  What a day!

…..and it’s goodbye from me.

George Town, Bahamas