Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's ChestLast week I finally got around to seeing Pirates of the Caribbean II: Electric Boogaloo—Er, no, um—I mean Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest.

What a blast! I loved it! It was every bit as much fun as the first movie.

I particularly liked the slapstick humor of the first big adventure chase as the heros attempted to escape from the cannibals. I was cracking up all through it. The other big chase after the chest later in the movie was great too.

While I was watching the movie, little did I know that Captain Jack Sparrow apparently likes the Caribbean so much that he spent some of his loot and bought himself his own private 35- or 45-acre Caribbean island, Little Hall's Pond Cay in the Bahamas.

I discovered this fact sometime this week—I don't recall how. But once I'd heard that Johnny Depp had his own private island, I was curious where exactly it was. Unfortunately, googling for information didn't reveal any GPS coordinates.

One web site did mention the name of the island: Little Hall's Pond Cay. It said it was out in the Out Islands (the Northern Exumas) of the Bahamas. (I'd never heard of the Exumas before.)

With a little searching, I learned that there was an island called Hall's Pond Cay that is part of the Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park. Once I knew this, a little more googling found a web site with a map of the Exumas with Hall's Pond Cay clearly labelled. With that map in one window, and Google Maps in another, it was easy to scan the satellite photos of the Caribbean in the area of the Bahamas and quickly find the island in question. Little Hall's Pond Cay had to be nearby.

Another search turned up a picture or two of Little Hall's Pond Cay. Using that photo as a reference, I compared the island outline against Google's imagery and was able to conclusively pinpoint Little Hall's Pond Cay as a smaller island immediately adjacent, south-by-southeast of Hall's Pond Cay.

If anyone's wondering what the GPS coordinates are, according to Google Maps, the coordinates are:Here's a Google Earth .kmz file marker with both islands labelled.



I'm 100% sure I've got the two islands correctly identified and located. I found an ariel photo of Hall's Pond Cay (the larger non-Depp-owned island) here: http://windom.cybox.com/photos/exumas_aerial/halls_pond.jpg

For more information on the Exuma Cays Land & Sea Park, check out this web site: http://www.nature.org/wherewework/caribbean/bahamas/wherewework/art8287.html

Having completed my Bahamas cay digression, let me finish on-topic: I eagerly await next year's release of Pirates III: Electric Beaglee. (Arr! Curses! That just doesn't work.)

Update: This article was edited to make corrections to the G.P.S. coordinates and to make clear that there are two islands sharing the name "Hall's Pond Cay", the one belonging to Depp prefixed with "Little" -- Thanks to those who let me know I had initially mistakenly marked the larger Hall's Pond Cay as Depp's private island, having assumed that there was only one island.