This is my first fish I speared.  It is a Blue Stripped Grunt.  There are lots of them around so they are easy to catch because they are so tame.  In the background there is a few other people that we went spear fishing with too.  Usually we go to our friends boat and have a fish dinner with the catch of the day.  The next picture is of all the fish all of us caught in the dinghy.  I also caught the silver fish, they are another kind of grunt.

The spear I am using is not the kind where you pull the trigger.  You pull back a rubber band really tight and then you let it go to spear the fish.  It is called a Hawaiian Sling.  I think spear fishing is easier than regular fishing because the fish are so tame.  As soon as you catch a fish, you put it above the water because they will wiggle right off your spear and then you will have to get them again.  This also keeps the blood out of the water otherwise you may attract sharks.  If you do, you just give your fish to the shark and get in the dinghy and go.

My first fish.

Our catch for the day.

There is some locals around the islands that will go out spear fishing also.  They come back with mostly conch, lobster and 1 really big fish.  It is amazing how many they come back with.  The picture of me holding a lobster, the locals speared that one but I am going to spear my first lobster soon I think.  My dad also has speared some lobsters, not quite as big as this one but they are pretty big.

This is how you find lobsters.  You look for little black twigs in rocks under water and those are lobster antennas.  Also if you see a hole in the coral, go down and look in the holes and there will be lobster in there too sometimes.  They do not run away.  They will sit there until you actually touch them.

Lobster.

Logan

Every evening at sundown we blow the conch and all the other boaters blow them at the same time.  It sounds really cool with the echoing in the bay.   A conch is the shell of a snail but it has 2 eyes and a little foot it walks around on.  They are very good eating.  To eat them, you cut a hole in the side of them at the 5th ring to get them out.  If you want a conch horn, you have to seal up that hole you made with some putty then at the 4th ring, you cut the top off the conch and it will look all spirally inside.  With a chisel, you hit the spiral out of it so it just looks like a funnel.

Conch shells are used for many different traditions.  One is at sunset, some are at weddings and a bathing ceremony.  These traditions take place in The Bahamas, The Caribbean and Hawaii.  Here is a picture of our conch.  This is the first one we caught.

Blowing of the conch shell is a tradition at sunset. This is the conch Mark caught a few days ago. The shells all make a different sound. It is somewhat like an elk bugling.

Cole & Logan blowing conch shells.

There are some conch that are good to eat and some that are bad to eat.  The good type is a Queen Conch.  The type you don’t want to eat is a King Conch.  The King Conch look a lot more beautiful but they do not taste so good.  You can’t eat any conch that are in 20 feet of water (deep water).  They are called black conch.  They are the regular Queen Conch but if you eat them from deep water, it will make you sick.

Logan

We have done some snorkeling along coral reefs.  When we snorkel, the thing we always see is a Sergeant Major fish.  The first picture is of a Sargeant Major.  We also see lots of stingrays, Spotted Eagle Rays, angelfish, tons of Parrot Fish and sea turtles.  One of the things I haven’t seen but I want to see is a green moral eel and a seahorse.  A little while ago snorkeling, we found a pirate coin buried in sand.  It is really cool, it has lots of engravings on it.

Sergeant Majors

Some of the coral reefs are dying from bleaching.  Bleaching is when the water gets warmer every year and coral starts to turn solid white.

We have snorkeled plane wrecks and ship wrecks as well.  A picture of the shark is by a shipwreck.

Plane Wreck

Shark

Here are some of the pictures of the reef fish.

Reef fish

Angle Fish

Lobster

Lion Fish

Here is a video of a Spotted Eagle Ray.  You can’t see its spots in the video but it is black with white spots all over.  You have to be careful with the rays because they have a barb at the end of their tail that could get you.  They are cool just to watch.

Enjoy!

Logan

We arrived in Nassau a couple of days ago. People have said Atlantis is a must see so we docked at one of the slips there and spent a day at the water park.  Atlantis had a cool aquarium and we saw manta rays, eels, lobster, jellyfish and all kinds of other tropical fish with a range of colors from blue, green, purple, orange and bright yellow.  It was very cool to see them all.

Eels.

Manta ray.

At the water park there was a lot of rides but there was two rides that were basically a straight down body slide.  At first I didn’t want to do it, but then I thought, if I’m here at Atlantis, I should just do every ride so here is a video of me going down The Leap of Faith and it was almost straight down into a glass underwater tube with sharks swimming by you.  It was so fast, you couldn’t even see them.  Now I know what it feels like to be a human bullet.

Another cool thing about Atlantis is its architecture.  They put their water slides on giant towers that look like they came out of the Lost City of Atlantis and they make water slides on a temple.  Here are a few pictures of Atlantis.

Atlantis.

Atlantis.

Next we are going to Allen’s Cay in the Exuma Islands.  There are big iguanas there all over.  If I get a chance, I will do a post about that.

Logan

There is a lot of different things to living on a boat.  When you want to turn on a light at home, you just flick on the light switch, but on a boat you go to a big control panel that turns on everything on whatever area you want on the boat.  For example you turn on cabin lights at the control panel then you can go and turn on the lights.  You also can’t leave them on for long because we have a very limited amount of power in our batteries.

This is the control panel where you turn on areas of the boat you need power to.

Another thing we have to conserve on is cooking because we only have a small gas tank so we can’t run the stove for a long period of time.  As you can see, we only have 3 cupboards so we have to pack all our food in very tightly.  We store food in other compartments that are not meant for food.  We also do not have an oven on our boat so we have something called an Omni Pot.  It acts just like an oven but you put it on the stove top or grill top because we have a grill on the back of our boat.  Our refrigerator is not exactly how it would look at home.  It’s more like a cooler sitting inside a counter top.

Kitchen on Truansea.

Refrigerator

The Omni Pot that takes the place of a stove. We can cook breads, cakes, casseroles, etc. in it.

We also have limited water.  Our tank is only 70 gallons.  To use water, we go to our control panel and turn our water pressure on and then we go to the sink and turn the water on.  A water pump from the tank pumps the water to the sink.  When we brush our teeth, we only turn the water on for 3 seconds or less.

We have 2 air conditioners on our boat.  It is rare to have 2 on a boat and in other parts of the country it is rare to have any.  We can only use them when we are hooked up to shore power.  We are hooked up to shore power by a big, thick cord that runs from a plug in on our boat to a special plug in on the dock.  Also on our control panel we have a DC side and an AC side.  We can only run AC when we are hooked up to shore power but we can run DC when we are not but we can’t use much because of our limited battery power supply.

If you want to know anything else about living on a boat, let me know.

Logan

This is a Curlytail Lizard I caught for a friend.  Curlytail’s mainly live in the Bahamas but then they were introduced to Florida in the 1940s to eat bugs off of sugar cane.  Now they are just eating all the other lizards.  They are easy to catch because when they try to turn or stop, they just spin out so you can catch them while they are spinning out.

Curlytail lizard

This gecko we found climbing on a wall while we were camping in Georgia.  Geckos can lose their tail and lose their skin to get away from predators.  It is a Common House Gecko and they only come out at night.

Gecko

Iguana’s are an invasive species that the locals call green dogs.  There are 3 different kinds of iguanas in Florida, the Common Green Iguana, Mexican Spiny Tailed and Black Spiny Tailed.  Their bites can make you very sick so do not try and catch one.  They can be territorial so if they get on your boat, you are going to have a very hard time getting them off.  There is one that lives on a catamaran near us.  They can grow up to 6 feet!

Common Green Iguana

I catch lots of Brown Anoles which I called lizards until I looked it up.  They can puff up their necks into a big red air sack.  The locals use them as earrings.

Brown Anole

Brown Anole – Mom’s new earing.

Logan

The bumblebee picture was at The Indianapolis Children’s Museum.  All of the cars are real life replicas of toy Hot Wheel cars.  They were at the museum too and the blue car can reach speeds up to 320 mph.

Bumble Bee at The Indianapolis Children’s Museum.

The picture of the six legged walker that looked like it came out of the movie screen of Star Wars is actually a John Deere tractor used to cut the trees down then it shreds the bark off of trees.  It walks on legs so it doesn’t kill all the vegetation.

The first picture is of the first Indy 500 race car in the back and the newest car in the front.  The next picture is of a salt flat racer.  These were at the Hall of Fame Museum-Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Logan