While in the Bahamas with the Living Oceans Foundation I had the opportunity to go ashore on Little Inagua and explore! The Inaguas are littered with sinkholes due to their karst topography and because of their remoteness they have barely been explored. One night while at Little Inagua, researcher Bernard Riegel found one of these sinkholes on satellite imagery that was close enough to shore and large enough that he thought we might be able to hike into it. I was beyond excited about potentially being able to explore a sinkhole that maybe no one had ever visited before.
It took quite a few conversations to convince the captain that we could make it to the sinkhole without getting hurt but in the end he granted us permission as long as we had radios, a shore contact, GPS, and a compass. The next day we set off on our adventure and Bernard and I found ourselves hiking through some of the toughest, sharpest, and thickest terrain we had ever been in before! In the end, the cuts, scrapes, and poison wood were more than worth it as we finally found ourselves at the edge of a beautiful sinkhole. We radioed back to the doctor on shore that we had made it and quickly jumped into the water to check out our new find. I had been talking about the potential for finding an unexplored cave for days and was beginning to lose hope as we had scoured most of the perimeter without any luck. Almost as soon as my hope had faded, Bernard pointed out a vertical rock wall just ahead and as we swam closer we realized the wall in fact opened up into a crack which ran underwater and then opened into the mouth of a cave!!!
Bernard and I were ecstatic! There was a strong temperature difference from the overlying water, and the walls of the mouth were covered in amazing sponges, crabs, and crustaceans. We only allowed ourselves to get just inside the cave mouth since we were free diving but we could see that the cave made a sharp turn to the right and definitely seemed to keep going.
Sorry there aren’t more photos but Bernard and I were working hard, traveling light (awesome Olympus Stylus Tough 810 camera), and worn out. Too bad we weren’t able to find any of the flamingos famous for inhabiting Little Inagua.
