What a great feeling to be in the water again – and in such a gorgeous place. We followed Peter and Mary (Rendezvous) to Quamina Cay where they said the snorkeling was fine. And it was!

My one regret about Sapodilla lagoon was that we didn’t feel quite comfortable swimming there. Although many folks did, the reports of crocodiles in the canals were enough to keep us out. Peter had seen one, and when we checked with Bonifacio, he said there was a big one near the marina. Thinking that perhaps they didn’t venture out into the lagoon proper, I asked him if he thought swimming was ok. His smiling response, “Weeeellll, you cooooouuuuld, but not on my say so” was the clincher. No swimming for me.

So it was a delight to find Quamina. It’s a cay we hadn’t even heard about before although it is marked on the charts just SW of the Pelican Cays. It’s a day anchorage only and good light is essential (and Peter’s “Turn now. Don’t go that way. Head straight for us.” directions sure helped. We started a track on the chart and marked some waypoints so we can get in there again. (You may be able to see how glorious it is by checking google earth with the latitude and longitude of this posting – see the links in the sidebar.) There are numerous peaks and valleys in the sea bottom here so we went quickly from 80 ft to 10 ft and were perched on a little plateau.

Once Jim checked the anchor and we stayed aboard a half hour to make sure we were settled, we grabbed our fins and snorkels and headed around to the east side of the cay where Peter and Mary had gone. In this pic, Jim (with snorkel hair, not bedhead) is a contented man after emerging from a swim among corals and fishes, with nearby pelicans splashing into the water doing their best to catch their dinners.

While I have yet to find coral as beautiful as I remember from North Long Cocoa two years ago (I’m beginning to wonder if I imagined it, but the blog postings show that I raved about it at the time!) there was a wonderful variety of tubes and fans and feathery plumes and brain coral. We drifted around for an hour, just loving being in the sea with aquarium style fish – neon blue ones and yellow stripey ones, tiny silvery ones that flitted by in schools and bigger fish that circled around to have a look at us. I hovered over a puffer fish that was well and truly puffed as he lay on the bottom, and avoided the area where Mary said she had seen a couple of barracudas big enough to be intimidating. We will go back again to snorkel the line of coral that stretches a mile and a half along the western edge of the cay. (That’s the same line of coral that we had to work our way through before we could get close to the cay.)

We ate lunch and I had one more snorkel excursion off the boat and then, since this is a day anchorage only, it was time to move on. We followed our track back out through the coral bar and motored south until we move East through it again. Rendezvous anchored off Crawl Cay and we went in there to see what the possibilities were for anchoring with them, but there were too many shallows and coral heads and too little room, so we left and went to our original destination – Lagoon Cay. That turned out to be a fine spot – at least until 2 am!

We enjoyed a gorgeous evening, watching more pelicans go crash-splashing into the water all along the edge of the cay. Those birds must have short lives with all those dives. They are not streamlined like gulls and terns. They look like they are making belly flops with great splashes of water before they emerge and swallow. The BBQ king cooked a fine pork tenderloin and I made garlic mashed potatoes and a broccoli salad. We sat in the cockpit for a long time, watching the sky, identifying stars and planets with the help of my iPad Sky Guide (Venus and Mars are really close together right now) and I watched a glorious shooting star go soaring across the sky – long long tail streaming out behind.

It was only when the wind picked up and the swells started curling in around the south side of the cay that we wished we had moved a little farther in to anchor on the innermost bar instead of opting for the outer one – where we thought we would have more room for emergency maneuvering if necessary. It was not necessary thank goodness! We endured the rock and roll till morning and then detached ourselves and headed south to Placencia. That same wind gave us a perfectly wonderful sail south – time to restock and connect with the world again for a couple of days.