Category Archives: Wildlife

Atlantis Waterpark — Day 3

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Wednesday, April 23, 2025 — We arrived at the park at 0930 so we could go on The Serpent Slide before the rest of the rides opened. We exited the ride right at 1000 and went straight to the river just as it opened. Today, the waves from the wave machine were noticeably bigger, there were a lot more breaking waves, and the ride moved faster. A couple of days ago, Christi had overheard a patron complaining to a lifeguard about the wave machine being turned down. The lifeguard had said there’d been too many accidents. The patron had said he understood why Atlantis needed to do that since, over the last few weeks, the Bahamas had been full of drunk, stupid 18 year old high school seniors on their spring breaks (the legal drinking age in the Bahamas is 18). We were wondering if Atlantis felt comfortable turning up the wave machine now that most spring breaks were over.  

At 1230, we started scoping out food options. One of the employees told us that the round building across the lagoon from Shake Shack was a Mexican restaurant called Crocodilo. Since Mexican food was our favorite, we were sold!  

From the waterslides, we walked over one of the lagoon bridges to the back the lagoon/ocean. Just to give you a sense of how big the resort was, the first shot was looking back at the main hotel from just beyond the bridge, and the second photo was of the restaurant, taken from the bridge.

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Atlantis Waterpark — Day 2, Part 2

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continued… The Mayan Temple four waterslides, and two went through a shark tank.

If you look carefully, you can see the sharks in the tank. The rectangular tube on the left was an inner tube ride called The Serpent Slide, the one on the right was called Leap of Faith and did not have an inner tube. Eric and Keith wanted to do the Leap of Faith first. Christi opted not to go. It was a straight drop down into the shark tank, and they moved through the tank extremely quickly.

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Atlantis Resort, Paradise Cay, Bahamas

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continued… This was far and away the most expensive marina we’d ever been to at $270 per night. However, it was actually a bargain because the slip included four tickets to the waterpark, and park tickets were $200 per day for non-Bahamians 13 and older. One of the perks of this marina was golf cart service, which we’ve never had before. Once we were ready to go, we called for a golf cart on the radio, and a few minutes later one arrived at the boat to pick us up. Here were Eric and Keith getting off the boat.

on the golf cart drive, we noticed some large, dark jellyfish in the water. The driver told us there were a lot of jellyfish here. He dropped us off at the edge of the enormous big pinkish building. We noticed some large, dark jellyfish in the water, and the driver told us where there was a ticket counter. The driver said we could skip the ticket counter and walk through the hotel to the waterpark; that we only need to show our marina keys to get into the park. Once inside, we could get wristbands from the customer service kiosks where they hand out towels. The wristbands would get us onto the rides.

We entered into what we thought was the hotel lobby. Nope. It was a small, high end shopping mall.

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Welcome to Atlantis Marina, Paradise Cay, Bahamas

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On Monday, April 21, the crescent moon was still glowing brightly even after the sun had fully risen.

Saturday and Sunday were quiet days. Farther south on Meeks Island was a farm that had pigs. Many of the tour boats that had been speeding by us were on their way to/from the pig farm. On Saturday, our big outing was a dinghy ride to see the pigs. We followed the island south.

We’d anchored near the area that we’d explored a few days prior. We noticed that there was a staircase carved into the rocks at the area that looked like it had once had a structure, so even though there wasn’t a beach on the west side, it was possible to anchor a dinghy and walk over to the beach on the east side.

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Welcome to Fernandez Bay, Cat Island, Bahamas

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Sunday, April 6 — According to the forecast, the wind was going to drastically switch directions on Tuesday. This meant that on Monday, we needed to move someplace with better protection for that type of wind. One of the primary topics of discussions the last few days was about where the best place would be to go.

The two sailboats in our D & D group both had obligations coming up in Georgetown, so they needed to ride out the winds at or near George Town. However, Eric didn’t think any of the anchorages in the George Town area looked like they’d be comfortable during the winds. 

Eric decided to head north to an anchorage called Rock Sound on Eleuthera island, and so did Haste Away, the other powerboat in our D & D group. The problem was that Rock Sound was an awkward distance from North Bight, so we wanted to break it up into two hops. The sailboats agreed to go as far north as Fernandez Bay (still on Cat Island) with the powerboats so that the group could have one more day together. From Fernandez Bay, Monday’s run would be 12-hours, so we could do the whole passage in daylight.  

As soon as we got up, we started getting the boat ready to go. Since we weren’t going far and we’d be in protected waters the whole way, we didn’t have to be too fastidious about securing stuff. We pulled up anchor at 0830 and dropped anchor in Fernandez Bay at 1045.

The wind was coming from the southeast, and this anchorage was totally protected from that wind direction. However, it was still a bit rolly from the swell coming in from the ocean. We decided not to deploy the flopper stoppers because retrieving them in the morning would cost us too much time.

The Kosmos crew decided to go for a dinghy ride in the estuary (the bottom part of the map above). We’d read that there was quite a bit of wildlife in there. As we’ve mentioned before, we haven’t seen a lot of wildlife in the Bahamas, so we were excited about this opportunity to see some. Here was the anchorage, taken from the dinghy.

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