Shroud Cay - Lazy River

Today was another sunny day in the Bahamas. Winds were light again so the water was crystal clear as well. Our little barracuda friend came by to tease Kevin some more. We can tell it's him because he's got some fishing line hanging from his gills. No wonder he now makes his home in the Exuma Park where no one can hook him.

This morning we fired up the dinghy to do some exploring inland. Shroud Cay is unique in that it has a series of saltwater creeks crisscrossing the island. At high tide they are deep enough to dinghy around in. Today was a good day to do this, since the sun was out and the water was calm so you could see the sandy, grassy bottom of the creek four feet below you. Although the creeks occur naturally they look like something you'd see at a theme park because they are perfectly walled in on either side by mangroves. It looks man-made, like someone tried to make a water park attraction along the lines of Golfland's Lazy River or Disney's Jungle Cruise. Parts of it reminded me of the movie "the African Queen" although for Kevin's sake I restrained myself from doing my (bad) impersonations of Kate Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart (schweethaart...). You can go in a creek on the west side of the island and come out on the beach on the east side, which is what we did. On the eastern beach there was something the guidebook called "Camp Driftwood". Back in the free-loving 60's a hermit named Ernest lived here on his sailboat and built a trail up the highest hill on the island (50 feet -- the Bahamas is not known for its mountainous terrain). He'd pick up whatever flotsam and jetsam washed up on the beach and make it into a table, a chair, or just plain weird artwork, all of which he left up on the hill's summit. He's long gone now, but nowadays cruisers just bring whatever junk they find on the beach and mark their boat name and the date on it and leave it up there. The oddest thing we saw there was that someone had carved a styrofoam float buoy into a mannequin head, complete with a construction hardhat (?) and a cigarette butt hanging out of his mouth. Other than that it was mostly junk -- t-shirts strung up on twine, baseball caps, a pair of sneakers dangling from a palm tree, lawn chairs, laundry baskets, and only the occasional piece of neatly engraved driftwood. We opted to just leave footprints, since someone had already stole our idea of carving a construction guy dummy head.