Hooweee. Sometimes challenging passages are highly satisfying, and sometimes they are just plain exhausting. This was one of those.

The Rauscher book shows some vague course bearings and the caution, "Keep a sharp lookout." It wasn't much help as we worked our way from deep water into the shallows to find that mooring ball and it took us a stressful hour and 15 minutes to motor one nautical mile. We were fine getting out to deep water from Northeast Sapodilla, and fine going south. It was working our way eastward that was the problem. We made the turn east when the bearing looked right, but we soon ran into shallow water - with the depth sounder showing 1 foot below the keel and dark coral heads appearing all around us. We crept carefully to starboard and found deeper water but we followed that too far and although we could see the two mooring balls by then, we couldn't find a way across a sandy bar to get to them. U-turn. Back part way and then off to starboard again and closer. For the last 250 feet the depth dropped and dropped until it showed 0.1 (less than 2 inches below the keel) when we were about 2 boat lengths away. I muttered, "I'll be damned if I go aground right now," as I gave the throttle a quick burst of power and then cut to idle, while Jim, boathook in hand, positioned himself on the bowsprit to grab the trailing pennant from the ball. Success! And we weren't bouncing off the bottom either.

The line from the ball was badly frayed so we attached another line to the section below the ball and snorkeled over the base of it to see how it looked, and it appeared to be solid. I guess we will see by tomorrow morning, since neither one of us is the least bit interested in retracing our path out of here today.

We discovered later that we went in at dead low tide, because the depth increased to a whopping 0.8, and as we swam beside the boat, we figured the depth sounder is offset a little more than we thought - when it reads 0.1 feet below, it means we have about 4 inches instead of 2.

During a stroll along the beach we met up with Raynaldo and his fellow fisheries officers jogging back and forth from their office to the wharf partway along the cay. They live here on the cay for two weeks at a time and then have a week off. Some members of the coast guard fished off the dock and we exchanged greetings as we followed a concrete path to see huge fuel tanks around the corner. The path ended and we turned back to the sandy one along the beach. A stationary bike and a rack of free weights stands outside the coast guard building. A couple of offices and cabins occupy the south end of the cay by the long dock, and we looked around a big room with some dated posters on the walls. A newish building with dorm rooms and classrooms stands empty near the other dock. Shower and toilet buildings were also non-functioning, and when I peeked inside a bathroom stall, it was positively disgusting. Apparently groups from the University of Belize come once in a while on field trips. Mmmmm.. Maybe. It looks to us like someone put some money into buildings, a huge stack of lawn chairs, cisterns for rainwater, and they aren't used.

We walked to the crescent beach on the east side to discover windrows of plastic and garbage where they had washed ashore. While the docks are well built and good boats are tied to them, the automatic light flashes as it should, and the people we met were friendly enough, we are a little ambivalent about Hunting Cay. We're not quite sure where the park fees go? What the responsibilities are here? Perhaps environmental clean up, mooring maintenance, some better use of the infrastructure already here might be appropriate?

We appreciated the use of the mooring - which held us secure during night winds of 15 -20 knots and eliminated worry about holding as well as having to manually haul up the anchor and chain. We got used to the lights on the dock at night. We liked being able to dinghy easily to both Nicholas Cay and Lime Cay and being right in the middle of prime snorkeling areas. But we certainly didn't feel that Hunting Cay itself was anything special.