Moving on to Staniel Cay

Moving on to Staniel Cay

Tearing ourselves away from the park after leisurely days at Cambridge Cay Mooring field – we headed a few miles south with Sea Dweller to Big Master Spot anchorage off Staniel Cay.   Staniel is a booming metropolis compared to the park with a busy airstrip, yacht club and THREE stores for topping up provisions.  After a relatively calm ride outside in the Exuma Sound to allow the fishermen/women a shot at Mahi, we turned into the cut and made a stop for H2O at the yacht club dock.  They also took our bags of trash for a small fee.  With slow water pressure we spent over an hour filling up our tanks that were down about half while Sea Dweller stood off waiting their turn.  It was fortunate that we had timed our arrival for slack tide since a wicked current runs through on a max ebb or flood.  After dropping the hook and sticking it on the first attempt among the big boys that play in this anchorage, we headed into the Isles General Store to drop off our empty propane tank. This handy service is up a shallow creek but next to a convenient dock so the tank did not have far to travel.  The store is typical Bahamas – sort of a reminder of our Saudi days – they sell everything from eggs and milk to fishing lures and boat filters with a few trinkets and doodads for spice.  We were lucky they were still open since we had to leave the tank and return the next day to pick it up.  The same kind of deal worked at the bakery – a yellow house with no sign but delicious smells.  The orders are placed in the afternoon for the next morning pick up.  The other two stores are the Blue and Pink stores – each having a slightly different variety of food and beverage items so each had to be carefully searched. Although fresh produce was limited a lot more was available than we expected given no boat came in that week because of the holiday.  With several restaurants on the cay and the well-stocked stores,  no one was starving – especially not us.

One of the better known attractions at Staniel is the Thunderball Grotto of the James Bond movie fame.  It is an easy snorkel – at slack low tide and well worth getting wet for.  Sadly we don’t have an underwater camera so you will have to come visit yourselves.  

From all these catch up posts it might also be clear that Staniel has its own tall cell tower so we finally had a nice strong signal to use our data plan....