Shroud Cay

Shroud Cay is one of the first islands that make up the Exuma Land and Sea Park.

The park was set up in 1958 and covers 176 square miles of cays, rocks and reefs. It is of course protected, no fishing, no conching, no shelling or taking of anything here! You can be fined, have your passport taken and even have your boat impounded. End of a happy vacation…you bet. Good thing that we don’t do any of that stuff anyways!! Well maybe a bit of shelling and it was too bad because I saw the most beautiful conk shells here, perfect in every way but we could not keep them. Bummer!

What can we say, I can’t believe that we have never stopped here before. Carl and Carly were right, this place is paradise!

The guide book that we have says that Shroud does not have anything to offer to cruisers and I guess that is why we have never stopped here before, were they wrong!!

Brian relaxing…enjoying the view

Shroud is beautiful!! It has tide creeks that run throughout the island that make for great exploring. The creeks themselves are just unbelievable. This place is truly heaven! Thankfully we have a dinghy motor now because it’s allowed us so much more freedom to explore. I know Brian would have rowed us through the miles of creeks here but this way he gets to enjoy it too.

Exploring out on the rocks

Snorkeling by rocks

There is a spot on a hill that is called Camp Driftwood that was built in the 1960’s by a sailor living on his boat just inside the creek, the camp they say was used by drug agents in the 1980’s to spy on aircraft flying from Norman’s Cay. Nothing left here but a hill but, what a view from up here!

View of the sound from Camp Driftwood

View of the creeks from the top of Camp Driftwood

They have some mooring balls here on the banks side but we chose to anchor in a cozy cove on the north side of the island. It’s a great spot for the east and south-east winds that we’ve been getting, nice and smooth. It was a little more private too. We had only 2 other boats that anchored in the bay with us.

One of our “swimming pools”

One more cool thing about this place is that there is a freshwater well.

Rocks piled high by cruisers means that something good is close by, in this case it led us to the fresh water well

Brian bringing up some cold fresh water from the well

There is actually lots of holes all over the place with fresh water being pretty abundant. This was very nice, we’ve had unlimited freshwater showers while we are here!! Squeaky clean 🙂

One of the many natural fresh water wells on the island

Brian pointing out pirate treasure, now if we could just get down there!

Brian to the rescue again!

I don’t know what it is about Brian and boats needing to be rescued. It seems that is bound to happen no matter where we travel. Here we are sitting in our cockpit and we see a dinghy in the distance. First they have their engine up…then it’s down…next they anchor…then they are trying to paddle (one paddle, guy on the bow) where too? It seems that they are paddling out into the open sea…next stop Andros, about 100 miles away. Here we are watching from the boat wondering what the heck these people are doing. Then it is pretty obvious they are in some trouble. Brian launches our dinghy to go see if they need help. At least this time he did not have to row the other boat to safety like has had to in the past, can we say loving the motor again! Brian saves the day! My, and their Hero!

As you can tell we had a great time in Shroud. We missed having internet and phone service though. Never thought that I would miss communicating with the world. Mostly missed not being able to call or e-mail our daughter Rachel. Waaa!!

OK, enough for now. Take care everyone, more updates to come soon –

Jennifer and Brian