It is our last day in the Exumas. We are planning to sail to Eleuthera tomorrow. It looks like a really nice day for sailing. There is some weather coming next week, in the form of a front that might stall over us bringing squalls and thunderstorms with high winds in them. There is also a chance of squalls this weekend.
As we were starting our day, we heard voices outside our boat. A police boat had pulled along side us. There were three officers aboard, one had a machine gun strapped on. They asked to see our documentation and any shells we had. We gave them our registration and passports. I pulled all of our shells (not many) from down below and they asked where we had gotten them. Shelling is not legal in the park and we had only taken pictures of the shells we found there.
The policeman in charge later told us that he had a report that our vessel had been taking conch illegally. We explained that we had picked up some conch and moved them to the edge of the water but that we had not taken any.
If there really was a report, someone must have seen us picking up the conch yesterday evening. We think it must have been someone in the harbour as a boat just passing by would not have been able to know which boat we were on. It was disconcerting that a fellow boater would report us to the police without talking to us or having a little better evidence of poaching. The police found everything in order and closed the investigation.
We tried to not let the events of the morning shadow our day but we felt betrayed. We thought about walking to snorkel on the seaside but it was a bit rough out there. We saw a large ray swimming when we reached the other side and watched it head toward the point.
We wandered back across the trail and swam in the blue pool. I looked for turtles there but did not see any. We saw some kite surfers on a sandbar we had not been to and headed over there. They were just learning to fly the kite so there was not much action. We walked a shallow isthmus of sand to another small island.
We checked for coral around some of the bigger islands but it was shallow and mostly sandy around them. In the harbour behind the larger island , we found some coral and dove on it. We then went back to dive our favorite islets one more time. We are learning from diving the same spot that many of the fish can be found in the same spots day after day. We visited our favorite grouper and cluster of yellow fish. We had to be more careful of motor boats today coming through the channel between the islets.
Some new boats entered the harbour bringing other new toys. An inflatable hobie cat raced up and down the anchorage.
My paddle board had to be deflated for the trip north so I took one last ride even though it was windy. I went into the mangrove cove but did not see any turtles.
We did some readying for our departure. We will pull Fat Tuesday up in the morning.
