The Mermaid’s Pool – located off of Carmichael Road.

It has surprised me that there are lots of cave systems on the other islands of the Bahamas but New Providence doesn’t seem to have any. Before I took my Intro to Cave course I thought that there was only The Lost Blue Hole, located 10 miles East of Nassau. However, my instructor Brian Kakuk told me that he thought there was a blue hole on the East of the island. This has lead to searching Google Maps for likely spots where a blue hole could be located. Unfortunately the resolution and the contrast of the images all but rendered that path of inquiry useless.

I then stumbled across caveatlas.com. They have a directory of caves and caverns that have been explored in the past all over the world. I clicked on the link for the Bahamas, which has 63 different caves listed. Sorting them by island, I find there is only one listed on New Providence – Mermaid’s Pool.

A screenshot from caveatlas.com

Clicking on the link takes you to more information about the site. Unfortunately there is no more information about Mermaid’s Pool. No GPS coordinates, no system maps, nothing about the state of the site.

A quick google search for Mermaid’s Pool uncovers the GPS coordinates and the location of the blue hole. I also find a couple of interesting articles from 1980-81 (I contacted the author for the dates): http://www.motygido.co.uk/bahamas_honeywagon.htm and http://www.motygido.co.uk/bahamas_rediscoverng.htm The author, Rob Attrill, asks for any information on the Blind Cave fish that dwell there and if anyone has dived it recently. He also gives up quite a bit of information about the Mermaid’s pool.

The Mermaid’s Pool sinks almost 200 feet into the limestone rock of New Providence – Rob Attrill

In his articles he states that there was an incident when sewage was dumped into the Mermaid’s Pool. This doesn’t bode well for it. If sewage was being dumped in the pool as far back as 1980 then it could be in a terrible state today. His description of the water is filthy and that visibility is terrible. The blue hole is located in a residential area so there could be all manner of things inside it. I wouldn’t want to take a dive in there and find myself ill.

My plan is to take a drive (not dive) out there and see what it looks like. I have heard that it is overgrown and that there is a quite a drop into the water I may even look at taking some water samples so that the state of the water can be determined.

His article also mentions that he had a map showing the location of other blue holes on the island. He states that there is one in a park next to R.M. Bailey Secondary School. The area beside there is very commercial and I can imagine that any hole may have gone to waste. Fingers crossed that it hasn’t.