May 30, 2016 Passage to the Berry Islands and catching mahi mahi

Today is Memorial Day in the US.  That was always the beginning of summer for us when we lived in SD.  It seemed strange to think of that, when it has been summer to us all winter!?!

We left about 8:00 this morning after listening to the weather again.  The wind was still going to be light, but we were ready to be somewhere else.  The Berry Islands are a stretch of island that run basically north to south over about 80nm.  There are a couple marinas in the south on Chub Cay and one at the north end on Great Harbor Cay.  And two islands in the north are owned by cruise ship lines and take their passengers to the beach resorts they have set up there :( I think there is only one town that is on Great Harbor Cay called Bullock’s Harbour. 

We planned to start in the south and work our way to the north end, as the weather allowed.  Then we would head back to the states from the northern end.  We could refuel there and pick up any last provisions. 

After measuring distances, we decide to head straight east to the middle of the Berries to make the passage shorter.  When we were about 15 miles off of the Berries, in 8000 ft of water, we caught a 3 foot mahi mahi!!   It was our first!  We were so excited to catch something besides barracuda.  We wrapped it in a towel and left it on the floor of the boat to clean later.  We arrived at Little Harbor Cay by about 4:00.  Dave cleaned the mahi, on our swim platform, but he put all the “parts” in a bucket.  Then we took them by dinghy far away from the boat to dispose of.  We didn’t see a wild feeding frenzy of sharks when we threw them overboard, so that was good. 

mahi wrapped in a towel until we anchor and can fillet it

first sight of land

beautiful anchorage

satisfied with setting the anchor in a bay all by ourselves

 
There is a restaurant on Little Harbor Cay, Flo’s Conch Bar, that was mentioned in the guidebooks as a great place to go and support the only inhabitants of the island, Chester and Lovely.  You have to call them by radio to make reservation at least 3 hours in advance, since they don’t have a lot of walk in customers.  After we disposed of our fish parts, we decided to just stop in and make our reservation for tomorrow.

Back at the boat, our own mahi was delicious!  Tonight, I did some calculations and realized that we just went over 5000 nautical miles on our boat over that last 3 years.  How cool is that?