Going Home

Monday 27th Feb – Thursday 2nd Mar
Left the anchorage at South Caicos and made our way across the Caicos Bank. This was crystal clear water between 2 and 3 metres deep. We draw about 1.3m so it was a bit un-nerving sailing at up to 10 knots across the bank with 700mm of water under us. The charts are quite good and give precise trig points between navigable water but knowing that the water half a mile away was knee deep kept us on our toes. Add to that the prospect of coral heads or bommies strewn around and you can imagine the nerves were shot when we arrived at Provo after 32 miles across the bank.
On approach to Provo about 5NM out we heard a someone calling a vessel in position blah blah and giving a lat and long. They did this a couple of times. On the second call I looked at the GPS and the position was almost where we were. I said to Mick that it sounded like they were calling us as there were no other boats in the area. It turns out they have an extensive Radar network and can see all vessels approaching. We responded and were asked to give our vessel details and those of the people onboard. We advised them of our destination and Customs and Immigration were sent to meet us. And meet us they did with outstretched arms and receipt books at the ready. (that would be cash only please.) 50 dollars to Customs to check in the boat. If we stayed over 7 days we would require a “cruising permit” at a further 300 dollars. No thanks I think we will leave before then. Then comes Immigration and another 30 bucks. Add another charge of 50 bucks from Customs to check us out and yep Immigration had their hand out for another 30 as well so our 4 days in T&C cost us a total of 160USD Cash only.
Rant over and back to our stay there. Mick was booked to fly back to Melbourne from here so we needed to stay for a few days. We arranged to hire a car for a couple of days to look around. Thankfully being an British Overseas Territory they were sensible and drove on the LHS of the road. They even had RHD cars. We sussed out all the things we needed to do and checked out where the airport was so we could drop Mick off at the appropriate time and then did some exploring, We caught up with Allison, the daughter of some friends who is working at Club Med Turqoise for dinner which was great. The restaurant was called Boogaloo and was right on the beach. There were stand up tables out in the water that you could have drinks at when the tide was in, quite bazaar.

Mick was duly dropped off at the airport in time to catch his flight and we started getting ready to leave. There were strong winds forecast for a few days and we wanted to be clear of Provo and in a secure anchorage when they arrived.