Charter Boats Everywhere! – Wardrick Wells Exuma’s, Bahamas – December 12, 2022

We headed out early and made it across the Exuma Sound without issue. It was expected to be heavy rolling waves but wasn’t bad at all. We headed straight across, through the Wardrick Wells Cut, and picked up a mooring at the park. It felt nice to be back to one of the MOST beautiful places on earth.

We had spent nearly three weeks here last year. We did our good deed and while hiking did a trash clean up at one of the beaches. When we dropped the trash off to the warden, there was a Mega-yacht checking in who was nearly 230 feet long and they were nickel and diming the warden. I don’t get it. If you have that kind of money to either own or charter a boat like that, why not pay the park what they are owed instead of trying to negotiate them down. I mean we are talking $70 max. We waited nearly ½ an hour At least we saw our plaque at the top of Boo Boo Hill from last year and felt the need to sign it again.

Well, no good deed goes unpunished since I realized that when we got back, my glasses had fallen out of my backpack at some point while we were out on the poisonwood trails and we nearly got hit by two charter boats coming in. I am not sure if it is this time of the year being near Christmas or simply because we were not in the Exumas much last year and this is where majority of the charter boats are. I really don’t remember seeing this many charter’s last year and it is scary since they don’t know how to anchor, cannot pick up a mooring very well, and tend to leave their generators on non-stop to support their need for air conditioning. It’s scary and we always seem to end up right next to one and they are all 50+ feet.

We decided to head north to Hawsbill Cay for the night as it was a place we had not visited before and the water was incredible!

But low and behold, the other Exuma phenomina…mega yachts (also charters). One pulled in and picked up the mooring RIGHT in front of us blocking our view of the beach. Then launched his tender and proceeded to preform figure eights around our boat. Gee thanks. This one was only a 70-footer which cost only $25K a week vs the super mega charters (230-footer) which cost a million a week. I know the Exuma’s is the land of the mega-yachts but there seem to be more this year. People just have too much money. Anyway, we moved to the other side of the mooring field and enjoyed our night a bit farther away from our new neighbors.

We got up the next morning to move a bit farther north to Shroud Cay and see the turtles. You can dinghy though the center of the island and we saw about 50 turtles, 2 rays, a shark, and a handful of fish.  The watercolor was amazing, and it was essentially a mangrove nursery which you could only explore on a rising tide.  We even saw Camp Driftwood which is a campground for cruisers.  It was stunning and now we headed south and spent the night at Cambridge Cay.