Shroud Cay

5/28/2021

Today we departed the anchorage at Norman’s Cay and moved into a national park, the Exuma Land and Sea Park.  We are tied to a mooring ball at one of the northernmost islands in the park, Shroud Cay.

This island is small and relatively unremarkable, but it has a couple small beaches as shown in the photo below.  Sinbad had great fun on the one shown below and left almost no bit of sand undisturbed.  Marilou and I both went for a walk separately on the trail shown at the left of the photo, but one of us had to stay with the dog as he wasn’t welcome except on the beach. 

I didn’t take a camera on the walk but I found a freshwater well on the island.  We have a watermaker on the boat that makes freshwater from seawater using a pressurized system called reverse osmosis.  Except for very recent times the freshwater wells were exceedingly important for long range sailing ships as they had trouble getting freshwater.  There are only a few wells in the Bahamas, and most of the water people use here comes from rain or watermakers. 

The park has installed a number of mooring buoys throughout some of the islands in the park.  These are relatively inexpensive, and we like to use them.  The photo below shows some of the boats in this cove tonight along with a couple unused mooring buoys. 

We are really seeing an increase in the number of boats here, and many very large boats.  It is coming to the off-season for the park, so we are a little surprised at the number of visitors.  I imagine there is even more traffic here in March and April.