Back to the Bahamas

Bahamas take 2! Well, it's July, I guess we better head back to the Bahamas...
After asking the boss if I could leave the country the next day, we jumped aboard a cruise ship and headed off for a 4-day cruise to the Bahamas. Now let me just say that I'm REALLY not a big fan of cruise ships. I'd much rather fly or boat over to an island without the thousands of people going with me. But hey, this was a free trip... 'business related', and I was a tag-a-long. So no complaints here.
Our first stop was Little Stirrup Cay located in the Berry Islands. We did a little touristy stuff, since the island is owned by Royal Caribbean, like check out the souveniers and humor ourselves at all the lobster skinned drunken tourists. We brought along our snorkel gear so we spent little time around the jet skis, kayaks, and other man-made entertainment. We snorkeled around by ourselves and saw some pretty cool things. We had never seen a live sea buscuit, and happened upon it by noticing a spurt of what appeared to be this milky substance, yeah you know what I mean. Well, it was buried in the sand, like all live sea buscuits, not laying on the surface in the dead bleached white shell you seldom find. It was really cool to see one alive in it's environment. Next, we started noticing many sea urchins, yeah, that means clean healthy water. Too, we found several conchs, small ones, but lots of them crawling all over. We spotted a very large, like basketball size, something like the 'Queen Helmet'. It was crawling close to shore, so we swam it out past a couple of grass beds and hid it from the 'inshore tourist snorkelers'. They seemed to pick everything up, and not have any clue about stepping on stuff. Oh well, you can't play God everywhere, [that was for my mom].
Later that day we were back on board, with rum drinks, comedy and a late night. Next stop, Nassau.
We got up early and caught a speed boat, Thriller, over to the private island 'Blackbeard's Cay' and snorkeled some more. This time the topic was 'stingrays'. First, let me say that this excursion does not even come close to the experience at 'Stingray City' in the Cayman Islands. These Atlantic Southern stingrays were much smaller and kept inside the beach area by a very large fenced in area. It was plenty large for the rays to swim about with old cannons and coral encrusted wreckage, just not as natural as seeing them in the 'wild'. We took some pics and I'll post a link to them soon along with others while on our trip. While we were snorkeling here we did see something we've never seen before — juvenile barracuda. Weird, we've seen millions of them all over the caribbean and coasts of Florida, but never ones the length of a pencil. They were acting tough like the big guys, but so small and hanging out in shallower water. Pretty cool. We also checked out a moray eel, decorator crab, anenome, some invertabrate I'll have to look up, and a few small reef fish all hanging out inside this encrusted piece of machinery. There were tons of urchins, and I know a couple people learned their lesson about standing up while you snorkel. It was pretty funny how 95% of the people were freaked out about the rays and were hesitant about getting in the water once we got there. Some didn't even get in. At the end, a couple of the locals fed the rays and passed out fish chunks for us to feed them ourselves. I lengthened the feeding by ripping the bait into smaller pieces. I should have some photos of it soon.
We had a blast there and jumped back on the speed boat and rocked out to Nellie Furtado's 'Premiscious Boy' (sp?) on the way back to downtown Nassau.
We had to check out the Straw Market once again. I decided I wanted a fake Rolex, so I talked the guy down from $95 to $35, and we picked up an imitation Gucci leather purse and wallet for our sisters. Once again, I managed to find the dude who was willing to sell me a few Cubans, so we also picked up some of those for back home. After a few rum drinks and hanging out downtown for a while we jumped back on the cruise ship and showered up for dinner.
I will have to mention that one of the funniest things that happened aboard our cruise was the last night of dinner. We were the first stop for the 'stringed trio' (not a quartet). They were mostly Spanish and were playing a small guitar, big bass celo I think, and a violin. You would expect us to choose something nice for dinner, maybe even La Bamba... but you should have seen everyone's faces when we got them to play 'Sweet Home Alabama'! What a riot! We laughed the whole time and everyone around turned their heads, some shaking them in disgust, and some cheering. It was priceless... or let's say worth the $5 tip.
As usual, we enjoyed the islands of the Bahamas and hope to be back soon.

Bahamas Anniversary Trip

In June, Spirit Airlines posted $49 flights from FLL to Nassau, so we fired up tix and flew over to the Bahamas for a 4 day trip. It was also our 5th anniversary, so we decided to make it special and stay at Atlantis. Well, aside from the awesome food and incredible salt water tanks, the price for the hotel was not really a big deal. Don't get me wrong, Atlantis is definitely an incredible place. We spent our anniversary sliding down the water slides and tubing through the shark tanks. It was a blast. We decided that if we come back we'll have to do it with our college friends.
We had our anniversary dinner at Fathoms, compliments of Big CR and Mary Ann, and that will be a dinner I'll never forget. We sat 1 foot away from on of the many 20-foot deep tanks. You almost think you're sitting in the middle of the ocean with manta rays the size of cars floating by, schools of hundreds of fish, yellowtail, jacks, angelfish, large grouper (including the one who watched us the entire time), just to name a few, and lobsters scurrying about the ocean floor. It was so awesome. We definitely recommend eating here, but make reservations ahead of time. To top off our dinner, a caribbean fire swallower/breather and dancers erupted into song and dance with a drum beat out of no where in the middle of the restaurant. It was crazy.
We hardly stayed in the hotel. We took the ferry over to downtown Nassau and checked out the Straw Market and the backroads to see what was going on, and tried to stay away from most of the tourist scene. We walked around the corner and happened to catch a Junkanoo celebration... Later we had lunch and watched to town close up around 4pm after 'rush hour'. We assume most of the places stay open for the cruise ships and the after-work crowd.
As always, we did some snorkeling. Compliments of the Stuart Cove's outfit, we had a chance to experience snorkeling with sharks. Although I'm really against the whole 'feed them and they will come' deal, we had a blast. We were was the first ones in the water, and I was the last to get out — after being yelled at to get out of the water. We took pics...
It was a fun trip, only a 45 minute flight, and we'll keep our eyes peeled for more cheap opportunities to get over there and give Uncle Willie a call to pick us up at the airport.