Allen's-Pensacola Cay

We left Freeport at 7:45am and headed north and got to West End at 11:20 where we fueled up our new tank and all of our gas cans.  We are now carrying 110 gallons of gas.  We left West End at 12:00pm and sailed until 9:50pm where we just dropped anchor and had a very rolly night of sleep.   Sailed 65 nautical miles Wednesday averaging 4 knots.  Woke Thursday morning and headed east again covering another 53 miles and made it to Allans-Pensacola Cay by 5:00pm.  We averaged 6 knots Thurdsay with a new high speed on the Jalapeno of 8.5 knots.  Thursday we fished all day and caught a handful of small jacks, one small barracuda, a mackeral (which we ate for dinner), and had a few big bites and fights that we lost.  It was a great day for sailing, the sun was out and the winds were 12-14 knots blowing southwest.

We have decided we like having our own private bay with pet sharks that we feed our scraps to.  That’s right as Preston was cleaning our fish last night he threw the head and tail in the water and within 1 minute we were joined by a 5 foot shark.  We continued to feed him the skin and guts of the fish when two more sharks showed up.  Really creepy to think that 5 minutes before Dan had dove in to check the anchor.  It was really fun and unnerving to watch them swim around our boat.  I hope the pictures do it justice because it was hard to keep my hand in the water knowing they were eating.  When we arrived at the anchorage we accompanied 4 other boats.  When we woke up this morning 2 had left already and by the time we were heading ashore the other 2 had left as well.  We had our own private bay and island the whole day.  There are some ruins of an old U.S. missile-tracking station on the cay that we wanted to check out.  We started on what we thought was the northeast tip of the island that actually turned out to be the northwest tip and basically hit every explorable place this island had to offer.  We did find the old station and more excitedly found a “signing tree.”  This is where past cruisers leave a message or name of their boat on a tree so all future cruisers can see who has been here.