Bimini, The Gateway to the Bahamas

We hopped off the boat Tuesday afternoon and immediately began exploring!  So much has happened in such a short period of time and our fun has just began.  Enjoy the pictures

The main drag, King Hwy.  They drive on the left here.

Bahama Nala! sike the dock we were at had two cats that looked just like Nala

 The famous Dolphin House.  The entire house was built by hand with beach finds like coral, conch shells, glass, tile, and other trinkets.  All stuck together with hand mixed cement.  It was quite impressive.

The Bimini 24 hour library.  Christine felt right at home

The water here is exactly as we imagined it, post card worthy!

These guys took a wrong turn.  This ship has been here for a hundred years

It took awhile to get this wave crashing pic

A Conch Garden

We went to the sand bars at low tide to look for conch

The first day we only found huge hermit crabs hiding in conch shells.

And a scary Sea Urchin

The second day we went to a better spot and caught our first live conch!  MMM lunch!

We also found this really big star fish. It was way cool!

We took our catch to the local hangout where they showed us how to get the conch out, skin it, and cook it.  They were all impressed with how pretty ours was.  It was almost too pretty to eat, almost.

We ate some of it raw and grilled the rest.  It was delicious and we can't wait to find more. 

We found this Eagle Ray at night, you gotta watch out cuz they will sting you!

The girl cat looked like Nala and the boy cat looked like an Avatar

Along one of the beaches we found some sea glass.  It was fun looking for different colors and nicely rounded pieces so we are gonna get a big collection and then make something out of it.  We found some tiles too and took them to the Dolphin House.

FYI: No Pot Smoking

One of the coolest things about Bimini is that we were docked right next to Janice and George.  Janice is the editor of the Doziers Bahamas Guide which we and most all cruisers use!  They have been cruising for 45 years and were a wealth of knowledge and a lot of fun.  Janice was kind enough to sign our cruising guide and George has been stung by a stingray three times which has temporarily scared fearless Christine out of the water.

Since we got here the winds have been around 20 knots and pinning our boat against the dock.  So we stayed at the marina an extra night.  The winds never let up but we were done paying for dockage so we left North Bimini and anchored in South Bimini.  We will see how good our trusty anchor is in these winds. It has never dragged before though.