Day 154, Year 6 Snorkel ’til You Drop
Date: Sunday, March 27, 2011
Weather: Overcast Early, Turning Sunny; Wind E 20-25 knots
Location: Behind Baradel Island, Tobago Cays, the Grenadines

I think we’ve done Steve in. It was overcast and windy this morning as a cold front passed over, so the guys decided it was a good time to clean the bottom of the boat. This requires snorkel gear, but I guess it is unfair to call it snorkeling. They worked for almost two hours and are still only 75 per cent done, but when they came up to take a break, they realized that they really didn’t have the energy to continue. Steve took a little snooze while Mark worked on the oven for me. I was trying to bake a pecan coffee cake, but the oven just wouldn’t light. By the time Mark got the oven going, it was time for lunch, so we put off tasting the coffee cake until mid-afternoon. Right after lunch, we hopped in the dinghy and headed out to snorkel. As soon as we got in the water, we realized there was a tremendous current. We did see lots of beautiful fish, including parrotfish much larger than we saw yesterday as well as lots of Blue Tangs and a great variety of other small fish. The fish life was great but the current was not. We fought it for a while, but since Mark and Steve were already tired from their morning’s work, we called it quits and said we’d return later in the afternoon. We came back and looked at some underwater photos from Madagascar and Chagos from this past year and from back in 2007 when Steve sailed with us in Fiji. It was then nap time for the ‘boys’. It was almost 5 o’clock when they got up. We went back out to the reef to snorkel, but this time Steve stayed in the dinghy. He said he was enjoying watching a wind surfer, but basically I think we had worn him out! Mark and I enjoyed our time in the water but the sun was getting low in the sky and it was soon time to return to Windbird.

On the way out to snorkel in the late afternoon, we stopped by a catamaran that came in this afternoon. The boat’s name is Nexus and it is out of Cape Town, South Africa. The people aboard were from Austria, but the yacht’s captain was Shelton Lindsey (we think) from Cape Town. We asked if by chance he happened to know our friend Bruce Tedder from Cape Town and he smiled really big and said he has known him since he was knee high. What a small world.

Tomorrow we will leave this beautiful spot and sail to Bequia. It is really hard to pull yourself away from a place like this. The Tobago Cays are just five little uninhabited islands with white sand beaches surrounded by almost surreal shades of iridescent blue to milky turquoise water. It is definitely my favorite kind of anchorage and I just have to hope that I will be back here in the next couple of years.

110327 Day 154 Tobago Cays–Underwater
From 110327 Day 154 Tobago Cays–Done In