A beautiful island
05 May 2018 | Caye Calker (Belize)
We stopped off at turneffe cay reef for a spot of snorkelling, we spent around an hour in the water. It was a bit of a mistake because it then took us the rest of the day to navigate through the hundreds of small cays and reefs to get to Belize City 🇧🇿 in order to check in, unfortunately we were too late by 15 minutes so we will have to stay anchored offshore for the night, so close and so near. In the morning we were awoken by the radio with customs wanting to come aboard, but the sea was so rough that they refused to get into our dinghy, but it was ok for us to do 3 return journeys, they also charged us over US$ 280 for our entry into Belize. We moved 2 miles down the coast to Kukumber marina but the water was too shallow for us to get in, so we anchored outside and used the dinghy.
We took a trip out to one of the many ancient Maya settlements that are dated back to around 280bc, we paid for a guide who lives on site, his knowledge was very good, I feel that it was US$ 10 well spent. Their history is very fascinating they had a class structure where the royalty and most powerful people lived at the top of the building and the poorest at the bottom within the foundations. Here I was shown a cashew nut freshly picked from the tree, it along with a strawberry are the only fruit 🍇 that grows the seeds on the outside, the fleshy part is yellow and is about as big as a sweet pepper and tasted very nice 👍, the nut is roasted and removed from the shell. We also had a bit of a tour around Belize city 🇧🇿 which is not very big at all, the cathedral is small also, it had some beautiful carvings.
We sailed early in the morning to Caye Calker, again it took most of the day to go 30 miles, we stopped off for a snorkel on the reef, the coral was big but I could see the destruction left from the last hurricane that came through a few years ago, the new growth was also showing. There was plenty of colourful little fish 🐟 but I only saw 2 large ones which were barracuda, they came right up to me and seemed huge, in reality they were probably a little over 1 metre long. Afterwards we motored up to our new anchor position, the depth of the water under our boat was less than 30cm, so we crept along with me up on the bow as lookout for any coral that was lurking just below the surface of the water 💦 this time (about 40 minutes) was quite nerve wracking for me, because I didn’t want to miss something that could have easily ripped a hole in the bottom of the boat ⛵️. We arrived safely 😅