We finally untangled ourselves from the pull of Placencia (gelato, internet, friends) and headed off toward the reef – about 2 hours later than we had anticipated. (Side note here – I think we are driving Liam a little crazy with our fluid time lines. He is used to people doing what they say they will do, when they say they will do it, while Jim and I are almost completely unreliable for that! Fortunately he is being quite polite about it!)

Because of the late departure, we anchored off the west side of one of the little cays that make up Blueground Range instead of being able to get inside into protected waters. It seemed fine at the time, but by 5 am the wind had shifted, we were bouncing and the anchor let go. We reanchored, made coffee, listened to the weather report and then when the sun was high enough to see, we worked our way into Blueground Range (where it was beautifully calm), waved back to a group of cheering Canadians on a Moorings boat, and kept on going to South Water Cay. We had to skirt many shoals on the way across, but with a bow watch and relatively good visibility we managed. It was much easier to see them behind us so given another chance, we’d choose to let the sun get higher before going through there. We radioed goodbye to Angie and Tom (Blue) as we headed into the pass and then we were on our way to the Reef.

After a pleasant sail during which we caught a mutton snapper, we saw the gorgeous line of bright turquoise water and shallow reef that mark the atoll appear in front of us. It really is dramatic coming from west to east. We rounded the SW corner, went in through the clear break in the reef as suggested in Freda’s book and zigzagged our way past numerous coral heads to the anchorage by the first of the SW Cays (where we were the only boat). 5 minutes later, the fisheries boat pulled up alongside to collect our $10 B per person park fee. With the fee paid and some lunch in our stomachs we set off to do some snorkeling on the nearby coral heads.

There were many to choose from! Once again, the coral was not as pretty as at North Long Cocoa, but the fish here were large and numerous. We peered over the edge of one large head to see a big nurse shark sitting motionless on the bottom, and saw several barracudas. I’m wary of one but not anxious, but when I saw two of them just a minute later, I backed off and headed quickly in another direction. They are really malevolent looking fish. Liam saw a group of 8 in one area – good thing I wasn’t there! You can see them eyeing you, their mouths turn down instead of up, making them look mean, and one of the ones I saw had his mouth open, looking even meaner with all those teeth. Fortunately I have never seen one that looked interested in pursuing passing swimmers. A whole school of beautiful velvety blue fish swam by, and many large queen parrotfish darted in and out of coral reefs. It was interesting here to swim along the edges of these little reefs, where the depth dropped from 6 ‘ to 20’.

We tried to take a walk on the gorgeous beach in front of the boat, but as soon as we got close, a woman came out to wave us off, saying it was todo privado. What a shame – not another soul around, but we weren’t allowed to walk there. Apparently there is a bar on the other cay, but we didn’t do any more investigation – the bar and galley on Madcap seemed like a good alternative.

Once we made another snorkeling tour on Thursday morning, we packed everything up, I made scones and boiled some eggs – passage food - and we headed off to Roatan. This time, we used the channel right behind us and went straight out through the reef in a much more direct route. Once again, you have to have enough light, but the deep water is easy to see. We’ll come back here again one day and do some more exploring, and even if we had only the one day here, it was worth it.