Great Harbour Cay, Bahamas…

Is pretty darn great! ;)) But in reality…it’s actually quite little.

Great Harbour Cay is such a small, tight knit community, without a ton of super touristy things to do. Although, we somehow managed to pack in a bit more activity than expected…more on our one crazy stingray day coming soon in a later blog post.

But I guess, it’s technically “Great” because it is the major island in the north Berry Islands. According to Wikipedia, Great Harbour Cay underwent a period of intense and successful development in the late 1960’s when Cary Grant, Brigitte Bardot, and a few other famous folks vacationed here. Development slowed and then stopped in the late 1970’s. Although attempts were made in the late 70’s and 80’s to revitalize Great Harbour Cay, they were overshadowed by drug and weapons traffic, and the island has been quiet since.

For one week, we were anchored just outside Great Harbour Cay closer to Bullock’s Harbour. By the way, our Mantus Anchor has really been doing a superb job! For us newbie cruisers/sailors, anchoring is sometimes a little daunting…and have a sense of security in knowing that we aren’t going to drag into rocks or other boats has really helped (although I still make Jer set the anchor alarm on our handheld GPS every night).

There wasn’t a whole heck of a lot to do on the west side of the island (other than work on our silly overheating issue). So we decided to pack up and sail on over to the pretty beach side of the island.

We arrived at sunset, and were greeted by this kind of view…

Not so bad, eh? ;))

I wish we would’ve relocated to the pretty side a lot sooner! It turned out to be such a great decision for lots of reasons, but seriously, how gorgeous is this beach… I couldn’t help but snap a million photos!

We swam at the beach, of course.  And kinda sorta snorkeled. …If putting on snorkel gear and swimming off the side of the boat counts? ;))

There were quite a few fish hanging out below our boat (on both sides of the island), including one very annoying barracuda, who thought it would be cool to hang around the boat the whole time we were anchored by the beach…not-so-great for snorkeling with a silver GoPro, if you know what I mean. We also saw a 4-foot nurse shark about 200 feet from our boat. That’s always comforting. ;))

We also finally had the perfect opportunity to bust out our awesome Tower inflatable stand up paddle board! Turns out, I’m not half bad at balancing on the board for a long time, while Jer’s much better at maneuvering and making turns with the board/paddle.

Even Oliver got in the mix! He loves SUPing with us (or at least we like to think he does.)

We met new friends, Travis and Katrina on s/v Lulu from Miami, who ended up anchoring with us outside of Bullock’s and joined us the day we tried to hunt down the elusive fish fry on the island. (We never actually found the party, lol.)

And we nicknamed their boat lululemon — because hello, it’s already named “lulu” and is bright yellow in color.  …the perfect nickname, right?!!

Oliver had a blast in Great Harbour too! He especially loved letting loose on the secluded beach and running like the crazy little poodle pants he is.

Most of the island (from the outside – particularly the west side) looks rocky and tropical like this…

And just like in Bimini, there are conch shells everywhere here!

It’s really been a great place to regroup and recharge our batteries, so to speak.

And we thought we were headed to Eleuthera from Great Harbour Cay, but turns out we headed down the Berry Island chain instead!

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