Dawn broke to Sarah and I having a cup of tea in the cockpit. It was quite calm now but Sarah was still feeling queezy, poor girl. Of the other four vessels, three were catamarans, probably on charter and commenced leaving from about dawn. The fourth was a cruiser with little sign of life aboard. People stumbled up to the cockpit in their own time, we had a nourishing breakfast of fruit and cereal, and by ten o'clock it was time to move to an anchorage closer to the island.
Having thought we may get away with the island to ourselves, a 60ft party catamaran appeared in the bay and dropped off a number of people at the jetty and then went around to the reef off the southern end, probably to allow people to snorkel, so we didn’t have the island to ourselves but, on the other hand, there was some totty and totto to improve the view. Peter went up to the spreader as lookout, Phil picked up the anchor and we felt our way back into the inner anchorage and anchored, eventually in the same spot that we'd picked on last time we'd been here. Sarah now made some lunch whilst Peter and Phil swam to the wreck for some snorkelling.
With lunch and some provisions, we went to the beach and pottered, read and relaxed for an hour on sun loungers before having our picnic lunch and the group of Italian and German tourists started to get their lunch from the building that serves as a restaurant, kitchen, loo etc. Sarah with a tip managed to find a few beers - and once we had had lunch and done some more reading chatting and relaxing, we went to the end of the beach with snorkelling gear and Peter Phil and I went snorkelling at the reef. Oh, hang on a minute, there was the feeding of the iguanas that came in between lunch and snorkelling, the islanders, a mixture of security and cooks, fed hermit crabs to the tame iguanas who enjoyed crunching into them for a midday snack, with many crabs making an escape to the beach.
Snorkelling was ok, but I did come across a fairly large barracuda which was interesting, he was just sitting above a tiny gully, facing the slight current, presumably waiting to pounce on something, he was about a metre long and at the time Phil was quite close, my mask was steaming up and I tried to clean it for a better view but by the time I'd finished mucking about it had disappeared. There was fan and brain coral and several small fish to see, but nothing wildly interesting. The party boat had now left and I swam back, via the wreck to Yemaya to get the curry out of the freezer for dinner (thanks Christine), and the others dozed and chatted ashore until about 5.00. We had mojitos in the cockpit for sundowners and then a good curry and early night because I wanted everyone up at 03.00 for an early start, partly to get back in time for their next casa particulares and because I thought they may enjoy some stars and night passage.
We set off this morning as planned, unfortunately the southern cross was only partly visible with cloud on the horizon, but once clear of the anchorage, which was a little nail biting on my part with the depth going down to almost nothing under the keel at one point and me not really knowing whether to go to port or starboard had we stopped suddenly, but all was well, we set sail and have been making between 2 and 5 knots for a few hours now. We hope to be in, in the early afternoon but still have 27 miles to run so it could actually go either way still.
Slainte Jock, Yemaya and crew C.
how nice to see pictures!!