We left Bimini yesterday morning after fueling up and headed for the wide open waters of the Great Bahamas Bank.  It is a huge body of water with channels to the Berry Islands, our next stop.

We motored all day on essentially glass-like waters, from 6-20 feet deep, easily seeing the bottom.  Huge starfish were everywhere but little other sea life.

It was a beautiful calm day.  Around 5 we started talking about anchorages.  No land in sight and 15 feet of water, we wanted to find shallower areas.

About sunset we spotted a small boat off to our right anchored out, only thing in the whole wide sea.

Maybe Captain Phillips the movie had unnecessarily scared us but just to be safe Ed got out his shotgun and brought it up to the cockpit.

“Tell me if you see that boat come in and follow behind us,” he said.

Whoa, that made me a little nervous.  We could see 3 guys on the boat with our binocs.  According to one of Ed’s sports commentators you see three or more men together it’s never a good thing.

But they stayed back and we put up the gun, unloaded of course.

By now we has decided to continue on  toward Chub Cay, which is about 35 miles north of Nassau.  But we couldn’t make that before midnight, so we decided to continue on in the dark til 9pm and anchor near the Northwest Channel marker.

As it turned out the marker was nonexistent, one source told us it was now just a post in the ground, submerged at high tide.

Yikes.  Ed started looking for shallower waters in the area and found an area north of the shipping routes where the Bahamian freighters travel.

He carefully guided the boat in pitch black and watched the depth finder steadily decrease to 12 ft.  Then he went up front and I steered til we got to 8ft and we dropped the hook.

The stars were beautiful, the water was calm, we could see the anchor on the bottom with our spotlight.

We had no idea what was around us.

In the morning we found out.  Nothing but open water.