Day 2 - Sunday

After a long day of travel yesterday we didn't get much accomplished other than settleing in and expoloring the island a little. There are two beach areas, one out front can be seen from the front dor (and is by far the prettiest) and one out back that can be seen fron the patio.

This is the view of the main beach from the front door

And this is the view from the beach.

This main beach isn't too teribly long, but it is plenty big for laying out and letting the kids play (if you choose to bring them). The water is crystal clear and knee to waiste deep for what seem like forever. We kept commenting that our kids (8, 3, &1) would love to play in that water and we wouldn't have to worry about drop offs. Notice that there are two boats int he picture... we were told we would have use of one boat for the week. Turns out, we had use of these two boats! One was a 17 ft flat bottom, the other a 13ft. Both were equipped with outboard motors but were set to only run at half throttle (a little frustrating for us as avid boaters, but understandable since many renters are not adequatly trained in boating and could really do some damage to the boat or themselves in such shallow water).

We woke this morning and cooked a full breakfast, then packed some drinks in a small cooler we brought and headed out to the bigger boat to explore the beach we found on the southern end of the island. At this end there is a rocky beach on our island, but a very long sandy beach on the uninhabited island across the way. Seperating the two area are two deep (maybe 15-20ft deep) cuts in the water that we though would be good fishing. Some of hte websites we looked at listed these as "Olympic sized swimming pool areas." For those that like swimming in deeper water, these would have been great as there is no grass, coral, sharp rocks, etc to bother you  whilie swimming, however, we were a little leary of swimming the channels after seeing two nurse sharks upon arrival.

We anchored at the sandy island across from ours and the boys set out to fishing while Mom and I walked hte beach. It was pretty and very clean. As I mentioned though, we did see two sharks which were fairly small, but when thinking about swimming can be unnerving. I eventually threw my fishing line out as well and it wasn't long before we had a good run. I reeled in a nice baraccuda to start of the trip.

We didn't catch much else but had a great time anyway. After a few hours we headed back to the house and made dinner. We hung out around the island the rest of the afternoon exploring and fishing. From the boat dock we caught a few small fish, which we used as bait, throughout the afternoon. Noel had mentioned that if we wanted to catch crawfish we should put out he 'fish pot' (trap) so we took part of the baraccuda I caught and put it in the trap at the end of the pier. Towards the evening we bagan seeing a shark coming in to check out the trap! The water here is only about 3 ft deep so it is very clear and we could see it well. Mom and I hooked him, but he broke my line :(

That evening, when the boys returned from thier fishing trip on the southern end, we all ended up on the peir fishing. Soon enough, another shark showed up to check out the fresh meat. Immediatly we all moved our baits closer to the trap to see if we could hook him. The boys were rather offended when he took mine, and I had yet another big fish on! Turned out to be about a 6 ft Lemon Shark.

That pretty much ended my day, and the boys came in soon after. It was a  relaxing day with lots of exciting moments. Tomorrow we plan a lot more of the same.