Dirty Little Secret

Man-O-War is a tidy manicured settlement.  There is no broken-down rusted equipment lying around that is so commonplace here…..but we found Man-O-Wars’ dirty little secret.  They may look all pretty and perfect on the surface, but a dive down below reveals they have made themselves quite an impressive artificial reef with all their garbage.  (And you thought I might talk about their family tree again, huh?)

We were doing a little float dive with the current plucking up a conch or two for dinner when we first came across a sunken car.  From there Keith added a grouper to the dinghy and the dinner menu.  Then we came across two more golf carts.  Then a fork lift.  It may be garbage but they make great diving!  Several more cars, boats, grills, and engines later I was startled by a wall of fish swimming by.  A large drive-on ferry was on the bottom and just swarming with large schools of fish. It was getting very late and visibility was waning so we didn’t have much time to check it out and thought we would come back the next day.  Unfortunately, priorities had to be taken care of, I was down to my very last can of Diet Coke and Keith had two cans of beer left.  An urgent sail to Marsh Harbor was in order.  It’s only five-ish miles so no biggie, we’d just come back after sailing to the grocery store.

A case of American beer runs between $50.00-$80.00 a case.  Ooof.  Keith decided to sample some of the slightly cheaper Bahamian beer.

 

 

The loser was High Rock.  Sands Light was described as club soda with a splash of beer.  Bush Crack, well, the name just cracked us up, but Keith finished the can.  We bought two cases of club soda Sands Light, two cases of Diet Coke and six ginger-ales for a startling $125.00.  A case of Bush Crack also made aboard. Carrying that stack of cans in the rain through the pitted streets and back to the dinghy on our tiny folding handcart was fun.  We were too cheap for the $10.00 taxi.

The next several days we ping-ponged back and forth between Man-O-War (MOW) and Marsh Harbour trying to get in another garbage reef dive and dodge some crappy weather.  We were miserably unsuccessful with either for a few days.  Marsh Harbour is a fabulously protected anchorage while MOW was completely wide open to the wind and waves. The forecast was a bit off and we spent a super squally day and night at MOW that we should have spent at Marsh and one mildly drizzly day at Marsh we should have spent at MOW. Oh well.  We finally got a chance to get in one last dive at MOW and filled up on some veggies from Marsh.  We even bought some Bahama chicken legs, the first meat we have bought since leaving the states.  The chicken legs are the size of turkey legs! And tasty too 🙂

See the boat in the photo below…. One night a freighter, yes, a full-on ship came through the anchorage and passed between us and that boat.  I tried to take a photo but it didn’t come out in the dark.  Scared the crap out of us. Thankfully we had our anchor light on!

^^that is our boat at anchor way out there 🙂 I love this life!