Cambridge Cay and Marine Park

We had to “kill some time” waiting on our new outboard to arrive, so we decided to hop back north a few islands and stop in at the Marine Park for some snorkeling. We chose to grab a mooring ball at Cambridge Cay after reading a few reviews and knew that it would put us within reach of a quick dinghy ride to some of the best snorkeling sites in the park (fingers crossed the outboard will let us get back to the boat after).

The next day we took the dinghy out and snorkeled the very aptly named “aquarium” and were dazzled by the clarity of the water and the vibrance of the life at this site. It’s clear how much of a difference the protected site provides for number and size of fish (and the variety was terrific as well).

After a couple hours watching fish and swimming with a turtle we stumbled upon here, Jen got cold so we hopped back in the dinghy and made our way to another spot or two… one with a sunken airplane and another with a fantastic reef, again teeming with fish. So Good!

The following day we snorkeled a bit in the bay where the big boat was sitting, but after experiencing high currents decided to simply drift back to the boat with the dinghy trailing behind us rather than having to fight the current either way. Not far from the boat as the slope dropped off to deeper waters we saw some giant spotted eagle rays and a shark. I could see the first ray coming in from behind Jen and tried to get her attention… but by the time I got her focus and she turned around it was less than 15’ away and coming straight towards us. I thought it was perfect, but Jen had no idea what to expect as she turned around in the water and was so shocked she screamed into her mask and scared the poor ray away.
Seems we’ll have to work on our underwater signals a bit…

After being in the water and starting to pay more attention, it was clear that our morning ball, being all the way at the north end sat just at the edge of the drop-off and the current brought in lots of fish, and with them some pelagics. Our plan was to be here for a couple of days, but between this newfound knowledge of huge life right under the boat (and some forecasted winds over 30kts) we extended to 4 lovely nights here.

We gained more and more confidence day by day and by the last couple days we weren’t even leaving the boat to snorkel anymore. Jen would stand up above “on watch” and whenever she could see a large gray mass moving through the water I would slide off the sugar scoop into the water, usually ending up almost right on top of a huge bull shark or eagle ray.
It was such an awesome experience, especially to not even have to leave the boat.

This spot was epic beautiful above water… but we simply can’t get enough of the access to underwater and given the ability to swim with sharks and rays this proved to be a very tough mooring to pry ourselves away from.

The winds finally died down, we slipped off the morning ball, said goodbye to our new friends under the boat and made our way back toward Gaulin. We did stop in for an overnight at Thomas Cay to see if we needed to come back another day, but then continued back to our “spot” at Gaulin and had sundowners once again with Ian from Stormy Weather.