Somebody had left behind their stuffed animals.

There was actually a flowering plant on the island.

I trolled a line while sailing between the islands, and caught several fish. One of the yellowtail snapper didn't quite make it into the boat whole though. Most likely a barracuda got to him.

It was on this passage that I finally crossed the Tropic of Cancer. I officially entered the tropics! The next islands visited are tropical isles! Okay, the distinction is incredibly academic, but it's worth a little celebration. I've got a shot of the GPS showing a latitude of 23° 26.4'. Looking up Tropic of Cancer on Wikipedia shows 23° 26.22'. But my nautical almanac shows the northernmost declination of the sun as 23° 26.4'. So that's what I went with. The difference is about 1000 feet, which, in relation to the circumference of the Earth, is really not a big deal.

All Aboard! The failboat is leaving port! It happens to all of us. Hard aground. I was cutting through Hog Cay cut, which has really strong currents, and there was very light wind. The cut itself bends, and the sun went behind a cloud so I couldn't tell where I needed to be. I couldn't have gotten there anyway. After trying a few things, I just sat down with a book and waited for the tide to lift me up. I would drag a few feet, then get stuck a little further along the bar. In the end, I dragged about 100 yards, over the course of 2 hours, before finally coming into deeper water.

But hey, check it out! If you look about two thirds of the way up....

And here's goodbye from Nathan and Tyann as I'm leaving Georgetown to return to Key West. It's about 9 am. No, they're not drunk. They're just crazy. Cheers, mates!

There was also quite a lot of grass and shrub-brush. It was the first time I'd seen a field in ages. Ages.

Also, there were these amazing green pools right next to the open water of the Atlantic Ocean. I went swimming in one of them. Too cool.

All over the Exumas, there are these sinkholes in the islands. The islands are this porous rock that gets eroded away, crumbling into sinkholes that can be as much as 20 feet deep.

The same phenomenon happens along the edge of islands, making caves that you can enter.

Another fairly common phenomenon are ponds. Yeah, that sounds self evident, but there's not a lot of standing fresh water. Okay, there's no standing fresh water. These ponds are ridiculously salty.

And there you have it.

A Bahamian Defense Force boat pulled up to the dock one day, and all of the sailors put their coats on the pilings to dry. Unfortunately, this picture is a little too overexposed to work.

A sea plane visited a couple days while we were there. It was pretty cool to see it take off and land. This is taking off.

And the harbor was teeming with nurse sharks, especially near the fish cleaning bench. Notice the sharksucker fish on the shark in the third picture (they're similar to remoras), and also all of the lobster heads on the ground in the fourth picture.

But the big draw here was Thunderball Grotto, where they filmed a scene from the Bond film - you guessed it - Thunderball. From the outside, nothing special.

But inside, the grotto was just amazingly beautiful. Oh, right. And I took this first picture upside down. I like the effect it creates.

Here are a couple pictures of Nathan and Tyann from the Grotto. I especially like Tyann's very Bond pose.

Once we were done, we fed the fishes a loaf of stale bread. They really loved it.

But you could snorkel under the cliff wall there into these caverns full of fun rock formations. That was very cool. I think the photos speak for themselves.

And here are Nathan and Tyann making fools of themselves. Immortalized on the internet (if there is such a thing as immortality in such an ever-changing medium.).

On the sail down, we did some close-quarters maneuvering and snapped pictures of each other. Here's me.

And here's Compass Cay. Are they all starting to look the same to you? At least it's the same in a good way.

On Compass Cay, there was an abandoned cottage overlooking the ocean. It looked like a hurricane had hit it a couple years ago, and then scavengers had done their work cleaning up the mess.

There was also a 'bubble bath', as they call it. It was fun to play around in, and some families pulled up to check it out while we were there. Kids get a huge kick out of it. Okay, okay, I did to.

Hi there crabby!