We've been getting into the water a lot lately, doing a couple of scuba dives and some snorkeling. We're still griping about the water clarity, but we're seeing a lot of sea creatures we've never seen before, and many which were rarely sighted further north, such as trunkfish and trumpetfish, seem more plentiful here. In any event, it's lovely to swim around and look at things. (Even if we're not allowed to kill and eat them.)
In Canouan we tried to find a dive site listed in our guidebook by using the chart, as the site consisted of a bunch of 30-foot high submerged rocks with 40 feet of water over them. The chart showed several "humps" of around 40 feet in 70 feet of water, so we marked them on our GPS and then dinghied out with the look bucket. It was hard to see much, and in any case the strong wind blew the dinghy all over the place while we were attempting to maneuver, so Britt jumped in with his mask and snorkel and scoped out the first underwater hump -- and (amazingly) found something. We marked it by dropping the dinghy anchor and tying the end to two lifejackets as a makeshift buoy, then came back with our scuba gear. It turned out to not be the site shown in the guidebook, but it was still a fun dive. The hump was a big mound covered in coral and sponges, and we found five large lobsters hidden in various spots around it. The most interesting part of the dive was that there were huge schools of fish -- one of brown chromis, one of creole wrasse, one of something tiny and silvery and shiny that we couldn't quite identify -- all swirling around us like animated confetti. The water sparkled and shimmered with fish. Four or five mackerel and a school of jacks cruised the reef margin; all they'd need to do for lunch would be to open their mouths and swim through the schools.
Snorkeling at Canouan, we found a "fish nursery" in some submerged rocks by the sandy edge of the island. Brightly-colored juvenile angelfish darted in and out of crevices, while a spindly crab in vivid orange kept watch over one hole, and a chain moray guarded another. Nearby we saw a school of ten squid, lined up and hovering over the sand bottom. We tried to figure out which end of a squid is the front and which is the back, but they move in both directions with equal facility. On our way back to the boat, Britt spotted an unusual-looking ray. It refused to move when we waved our hands near it, and I was half convinced it was dead, but finally Britt poked it with the edge of his fin, and it roused itself enough to move about two feet before settling back into the sand. Back at the boat, we looked it up in our fish books and discovered it was an electric ray -- good think we hadn't poked at it with our fingers!
We saw more unusual creatures while scuba diving off Mayreau with Theresa and Patrick from Kajsa, who we'd met in Bequia. The wreck of a WWI gunboat lies just off the island in 40 feet of water, and it's completely encased in corals and other sea growth. Several morays live underneath it, and we also saw scrawled filefish and a big porcupinefish. An octopus under the bow changed color in an attempt at camouflage when it saw us come snooping by its lair. On one collapsed beam a number of little iridescent purple shrimp and gobies had set up a "cleaning station", sort of a car wash for fish. As I swam by, a glasseye snapper was hovering along the beam, having parasites picked off (and eaten) by the cleaning crew on duty, while the off-watch shrimp waved their antennae at passing fish, trying to drum up more business.
The Tobago Cays are famous in the Caribbean for the great snorkeling, but we've been spoiled by the Bahamas. We snorkeled several spots, including a trip out to the "End of the World Reef" (Britt insisted on going just because of the name), and did a little scuba dive along with Kajsa. The reefs are nice, but there's a dearth of large game fish -- maybe because the area was heavily fished before it was made a no-take National Park. We did see one big grouper, the largest since the Bahamas, and a curious cero mackerel which would have been dinner if we'd been allowed to bring our spears. A few sharks cruised the reef, unhampered by the regulations which only apply to humans.
Since we've been diving off our dinghy in some high-traffic spots lately, we decided we needed a dive flag. The red Georgetown Cruising Regatta flag I won last year for second place in the biathlon was a good starting point, but none of our white fabric scraps were quite the right weight to make the diagonal stripe. I finally decided that sewing required too much effort, and painted a white stripe on the red flag using "liquid rope whipping", sort of a white plastic paint. It doesn't exactly look professional, but it does look more or less like a dive flag.
Speaking of flags, we finally retired our poor old Stars and Stripes. The US flag which came with the boat was fairly faded and thin, and the past two years of cruising haven't been too kind to it. It was originally mounted on the stern rail, the proper place for the national flag, but when we got the arch and started using the dinghy davits, the dink got in the way of the flag. More than that, the flag got in the way of us -- it would flap around and generally make a nuisance of itself, and Britt in particular was not too fond of having the flag there. We had talked about making a flag halyard for the radar pole, but when we installed the solar panels on the arch we realized that if we put the flag on the radar pole, it could shade the panels.
I really wanted to fly our national flag, particularly as we traveled outside the US, so we moved the mounting to the aft port rail, just ahead of the arch. This seemed at first like a good place. But the flag flapped hard against the cleats mounted on the arch for use with the dinghy hoist system, and since the fabric was sun-weakened it rapidly shredded itself on the pointy ends of the cleats.
We'd bought a new flag in Florida, and I decided we'd been disgracing our old one long enough. But Britt pointed out that if we put the new one in the old spot, it would soon be ripped up as well. So right now we have the flag mounted in an unusual spot -- the pole mount is on part of the bimini frame. It looks kind of weird, but it's still at least more or less to the stern and thus "correct". But the flag tends to flap against the bimini, which is annoyingly noisy and probably good for neither flag nor bimini. One of these days, we're going to have to come up with something better.
It's been a long time since the last anchor story, but it seems that anchor karma always catches up to everyone eventually. This time we were in Saltwhistle Bay at the northwest corner of Mayreau. When we arrived, the anchorage was fairly crowded, and we anchored close to the entrance of the bay, behind and to the right of a Canadian boat named Skylark, and directly behind a French charter boat. It had been blowing 20+ knots for a few days, and a wicked surge wrapped around the entrance, causing all the boats in the back half of the anchorage to act like pendulums. It was an uncomfortable night.
In the morning we decided that after a hike around the island, we'd move somewhere else, but just as we got ready to get into the dinghy to go ashore, the French charter boat started weighing anchor. We quickly decided to move forward and re-anchor in their spot. We saw a buoy off to the left, which we assumed was a mooring (there were a few scattered here and there), and dropped our anchor ahead and to the right of it.
When we fell back on the anchor, it didn't catch right away, but dragged across the bottom. With the wind (still over 20 knots) pushing us back and sideways (since the bow gets shoved around more), we were backing toward Skylark. Suddenly, we noticed we had dragged a lot closer to Skylark than we ought to be, perilously close to their anchor rode, and started backing off carefully. I coasted in neutral as we went by, not wanting to get their line wrapped around our prop. Then we realized that the "mooring buoy" was a float marking their anchor, and shortly after that, we discovered we'd snagged their anchor with ours. Oops.
Britt quickly dropped our secondary anchor to keep us from going anywhere, placing us parallel to Skylark, out of the mega-roll zone but still further back than we'd intended to be. Then Britt got his snorkel gear on, jumped in, and went to untangle the anchors and get both boats reset.
Meanwhile, another boat came into the harbor, motored around us, and anchored right in the spot we'd wanted!
Well, them's the breaks. We weren't where we'd intended to be, but the new spot was calm enough, so Britt hand-set our primary anchor off to our right, to keep us away from Skylark. We were already way overdue to go on our hike, so we left both anchors down in vee-formation, and dinked in to shore.
End of story? Not quite. That evening, well after dark, we heard anchoring noises and looked out to see a boat dropping the hook quite close to us on the right. They settled back into a slot that seemed a little too neighborly, but not actually hazardous, and we went back below and went to bed. Later that night, the wind came up hard again -- we recorded a maximum speed of 32 knots -- and also shifted a little south of east. I woke to the noise and got up to get a drink of water, glancing out the companionway as I headed for the fridge. When I saw the other boat's bow practically sitting in our cockpit, I yelped and headed outside, all thoughts of drinks forgotten. I quickly determined that we weren't dragging -- now, how the heck did that other boat drag upwind?
Britt had followed me upstairs, and as we watched the other boat we figured out what had happened. When the wind changes direction, a boat on two anchors (like us) moves in a smaller radius than a boat on a single anchor. The windshift brought our new neighbor a little closer to us. In addition, most boats will "sail" a little on their anchors, swinging back and forth to each side rather than simply pointing into the wind. Light boats with deep fin keels tend to sail at anchor more than heavier, full-keeled boats. Windom doesn't sail much at anchor, and on two anchors we were held even more steadily into the howling wind, but the newcomer, a lightweight charter boat, zigzagged crazily back and forth. On the zigs, it looked like it was a reasonable distance away, but the zags brought that boat right up our butt. I was sure we'd catch our dinghy on their anchor line as they whipsawed across. Eventually, someone on the other boat got up and let out more line, and they backed up and out of range. (Of course, if the wind had continued to veer toward the south, they would end up swinging smack into us. Fortunately this is the southern Caribbean, where the wind direction varies only within a range of about 15 degrees.)
We'd planned to spend some time in Union Island, Petit Martinique, and Carriacou before moving on to Grenada, but reality has intruded. Specifically, our dinghy pump has developed an alarming crack, and now it barely works. This is a major problem, mostly because our dinghy leaks air so profusely that we need to pump it up every few days. Our best hope for getting a new pump is Grenada, so we will probably start heading that way as soon as the next tropical wave is finished with us. (During the most recent wave, we had sustained winds of 25-30 knots, and we're not too inclined to go out in that if we don't have to.) So it's time to go south again.