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Our final day of diving was foiled by weather again, so five of us rented bikes from the dive shop and wandered south to the tip of our island. The beach was covered with a fine selection of polished glass and conch shells, as well as random trash and bits of coral. We walked north to the shipwreck we had seen on our first dive, a heavily rusted one-stack tramp steamer from Belize called the Galant [sic] Lady. directly inland, we found a ruined resort which, in its day, must have been quite luxurious. I wondered if the steamer's arrival had been a postscript to the hotel's story, or its cause. We poked around in the ruins, careful not to fall into the twelve-foot deep sinkholes in the foundation.
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From there, we rode north to the main dock and took a ferry (actually, just a houseboat fitted with bench seating) over to South Bimini, where we covered a good portion of the island. Wandering south on the main road, we passed new condo construction and older vacation houses, ending at a fork in the road. Stopping in at the shark lab, nobody came out to meet us, so we continued northward, quickly finding ourselves in deep woods, on long, empty roads. At the end of a long stretch, we found the Bimini airport, and two men cursing at the engine of a Cessna over loud reggae piped in from a Lexus sedan. Through the woods after the airport, we came upon the northern shore of the southern island, and the remains of the Bimini VOR station, now just a pair of empty corrugated sheds.
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Southward from the airport, we rode to the tip of the island and found the other island hotel quiet, between seasons. Looking around (and glad to be off our bikes), we hit the restaurant for a tasty lunch and then examined the two diveboats moored in the harbor, agreeing that our accomodations were far superior to jumping off a 45-foot sailboat with scuba gear on.
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Our return leg took us past the Fountain of Youth, which, legend has it, was the object of Ponce De Leon's explorations. We found it to be no more than a cement wishing well with a rusty bucket holding stagnant water. Declining our shot at immortal youth, we winched the bucket back down and returned to our bikes to escape the mosquitoes. Unfortunately on our arrival back at the dock, the surf was still high, which ruled out any attempt at a night dive.
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Returning back at the hotel mid-afternoon, we looked through some photos and sat around the pool waiting for dinner. Todd, with a mischevious grin, uncovered a fiberglas model of a hammerhead and we took some goofy
pictures to commemorate our brushes with death.
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To celebrate our arrival (and imminent departure), the hotel staff queued up the same CD we had been listening to during all our meals at the restaurant.
"I'm going to jail...
I ain't got no bail..."
divelog ->
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