Fowl Cay (aka Chicken Cay) is a small, private cay located just south of the Exuma Land and Sea Park and the perfect landing point for so many nearby attractions. Despite the name, we did not see any chickens on the island – we did have a guest seagull for dinner, though. From here we took our dinghy to explore the Rocky Dundas Caves, snorkel the Aquarium and sunken plane, splash around in Rachel’s Bubble Bath, and swim with the nurse sharks. Talk about a fun and busy place!
Our dinner guest
As we are approaching the last couple of miles into our planned anchorage at Fowl Cay, we have a friendly seagull coasting behind our boat taking advantage of the wind protection. Eventually he decides even coasting is too much work and instead sits on our dinghy davit – smart bird. He rides with us all the way into the anchorage and sticks around as we get a good set on our anchor.
As it approaches dinner time, he’s hinting that he’d like some fish thrown his way. We don’t have any fish of course (haven’t even attempted fishing yet – oops!), so we tell him he’ll have to settle for some bread. As any polite dinner guest, he happily accepts the bread with no complaints. Initially, Matt is setting the bread out for him on top of the dinghy, but that doesn’t seem like much fun for any of us. The seagull hovers just behind the boat at arm’s length so that Matt can toss pieces of bread into the air and he can swoop in to catch them. Now we’ve got dinner and a show!
After downing a few pieces of bread, the seagull decides he’s full and takes off a bit later. Apparently we have a thing for picking up hitchhikers with wings. Check out our post on crossing the Gulf Stream to see who hitched a ride with us out in the middle of the ocean!
Rachel’s Bubble Bath
Given that there’s still some day light left and we need to get Monster to some sort of land, we decide to head on over to Rachel’s Bubble Bath. We land our dinghy on the beach and follow what looks like old footprints in the sand towards the Atlantic side. As we near the area, we begin to hear waves crashing and see those little artist rock piles that everyone builds nowadays. Seems like we’re in the right place, but we aren’t really seeing anything that resembles a bubble bath.
We wonder around a bit and build our own rock sculpture – why not? After a few more minutes, we begin to see some waves crashing in over the rock formation into a small pool of water. You know what – that does look a bit like a bubble bath. A sad bubble bath that needs more bubbles, but a bubble bath all the same. We’re at a rising tide so as the tide level continues to rise, the waves and bubbles continue to grow. We’re the only ones here so we decide to wade out into the “bubble bath” to get the full experience and snap a few photos!
Snorkeling by our boat
I think that most cruisers dream of anchoring or tying up to a mooring ball somewhere that allows you to jump into the water with mask and fins and immediately be immersed in an underwater aquarium. That’s our dream at least. So far, that hasn’t really been a reality for us much though – except when we were able to tie up to dive mooring balls and hop in with our hookah system! This anchorage at Fowl Cay finally offers that! It’s no dive site, but there are gorgeous, healthy coral heads in 3-12 feet of water with tons of colorful fish swimming around. It isn’t the “best” snorkeling we’ve experienced, but it’s some of the most peaceful.
Being so close to the boat, I hop in a couple different times while Matt is working. There is a large resident barracuda that always comes to check me out and typically a sting ray under the boat. Once, we even spot a cute turtle swimming through the reef! Monster isn’t the biggest fan of when I head out to snorkel, though, which creates a barking problem. My solo snorkel adventures are short lived as I come back to quiet down the dog. I think she has attachment issues. Okay, fine – her and I both do.
When Matt has a break from work, he joins me in the water and we decide to try taking Monster with us. Now she’s already tried snorkeling once and decided she preferred to keep watch from the dinghy. This time, we aren’t taking the dinghy, so we decide to try using her inflatable pool – yes, she has a splash pool on board. I place her (still wearing a life jacket) into the floating pool and tie a rope so she can’t float away. At first, it seems genius and appears to be working well. Then she realizes that she’s still on the water and not solid ground. It goes downhill from there. We struggle through a 10 minute snorkel before Monster goes back to barking at us from the boat. We’ll have to keep working on this.
Rocky Dundas Caves
The caves are located within the Land and Sea Park and just a five minute dinghy ride from our anchorage! When we arrive, we are able to tie up our dinghy to a small mooring ball and immediately jump in. The caves are talked about by the cruising community quite a bit, but we are keeping our expectations low.
First, we are impressed by how nice the coral and snorkeling is around the cave area – very pretty. We even spot a free swimming spotted eel – first eel of the Bahamas for us! We don’t get a video of it actually swimming, but we did get a photo of its smiling face (we prefer to think of this as a smile). We head into the first cave and are even more impressed. It’s small, but much larger than we expected and you can fully enter and be almost “enclosed” within the cave. The walls are gorgeous colors and large stalactites hang from the ceiling.
After enjoying the view and capturing a few photos, we snorkel our way over to the second cave. It looks very much the same and is just as pretty, but this one has more space to move and a small area to get out of the water to poke around. Sunlight pours in from above where a few holes are present in the cave’s ceiling. Below is a short video showing the inside of the caves – check out all the colors!
From the caves, we head over towards the popular snorkel site known as the Aquarium. With a name like that, we’re expecting that it has to be good! There’s so much excitement going on here around Fowl Cay, that you’ll have to stick around for our next post to hear more about the Aquarium, the sunken airplane, and of course – swimming with the sharks!
