Green Cay in the Tongue of the Ocean

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

024-2.160 N
077-10.800 W

Ahoy from Green Cay in the Tongue of the Ocean,

The photo to the right is from NASA which shows a deep blue body of water known as the Tongue of the Ocean surrounded by Andros Island on the left, Green Cay in the middle, New Providence Island (Nassau) at the middle top and Eleuthera Island at the top right. The Tongue of the Ocean is very deep (4000-5000') and light blue surrounding it is very shallow water (2-24'). When you cross from the deep water to the shallow water, the depth goes from unreadable to 100' and then rapidly to 20'. It's quite amazing! At the bottom of the photo you can see huge sand channels leading to the edge of this submarine canyon.

The Tongue of the Ocean is used by the US Navy to do acoustic testing and training. There are 4 AUTEC bases on Andros that support this. The charts for the area have lots of markings and warnings that aren't common. The waters have hydrophones installed, so I'm sure that there's some Navy guy out there tracking our progress on some very sophisticated equipment. I just hope that we don't run into any submarines!

Yesterday we motor 20 miles to Green Cay which is yet another inhabited island. It's a bigger island, being about 1.4 miles long and 0.8 miles wide. There seem to be a lot of different types of birds as I heard many different calls. It also has nice tall trees and palms. Most of the island's shore is rocky, but there were some very nice sandy beaches. We went out exploring right after we anchored and found one beach loaded with shells. I think that the boat has settled another inch with all of the shells that we have aboard!

When we got back to the boat I went for a swim to check out the coral. I didn't find much of interest, but I did find a large ship anchor in the sand covered by growth. Unfortunately it was in 24' of water, so I couldn't spend much time checking it out. The 4' reef shark that was patrolling the area and checking me out didn't help matters either. I'm sure that in a while I'll get used to the sharks, but right now they kind of freak me out. I had wanted to check it out this AM, but we needed to get moving. Sigh...

Today we're headed to Middle Bight on Andros. We're headed dead down wind and our apparent wind is 0.0 kts, which makes for a hot passage. That's all from here!

-- Geoff & Sue

For the cruiser:

We anchored on the west side at 24-02.14N 077-10.83W in 18' in nice deep sand. The bottom had a few scattered sponges and sea fans and no coral. It was a very calm anchorage.
Log ID: 859