Photo: Big Sand Cay

We began our day with an excursion ashore on Big Sand Cay, which features beautiful white sand and scrubby grass that runs the length of the island, which is 1.5 miles long and about 400 yards wide. After our short promenade, we headed back to the boat and made ready to check its bottom.

Gads, no wonder the boat felt slow... A quick look at the bottom and soon the whole crew was in snorkel gear, scraping an astonishing amount of hard worm-like growth off the bottom of the boat, propeller and shaft. Two hours of scraping later, our fingers looked like they had been stuck in a small blender, with plenty of nicks and digs inflicted by the hard growth. As we scraped the stuff off it accumulated in a dark pile on the white sand bottom under the boat. I can't imagine what the bottom would have looked like after a month in Luperon, never mind two weeks...

Pooped out from the bottom job, we decided to pass on sailing across the Turks Island Passage to Big Ambergris and opted stay put for another night. We will leave the next day before sun-up and head across the Caicos Bank to French Cay.