Beachcombing West Caicos

In which our Sidetracked Expatriates Deviate from Plan and
Boat to West Caicos for No Other Reason than To Check Out the Beach.
Dooley the Diverted Keeps His Opinions to Himself.

Instead of another sunset, we're going to open this post with one of La Gringa's photos of some of the plant life around here. (I actually just realized I didn't even have a good sunrise photo from this week, so she ran outside with her camera about fifteen minutes ago and snapped this to save me. No kidding.)



This post is the second part of the trip we wrote about in the last post. We took a lot of photos that day, and divided them into two posts instead of one big, slow-loading one. West Caicos doesn't really have anything to do with Turtle Rock anyway.

Speaking of Turtle Rock, I'll start with the last photo from last week. This is the view from where we were anchored. It's not West Caicos. It's actually looking from Turtle Rock over Proggin Bay to the undeveloped shoreline that leads out to West Harbour Bluff and Osprey Rock.



We had never boated along that shoreline and with the weather and water being so calm we thought it the perfect opportunity to go take a look. I mean, why not? We had a boat, fuel, sunshine, calm winds... why the heck not? Before we left Turtle Rock I did snap some photos of the underside of the skiff. I was interested in seeing how much water it was drawing at rest with the outboard all the way down on the jackplate. You can also see where I scuffed the paint off the skeg on the last trip to Three Mary Cays.



With the jackplate in the full up position the motor is raised six inches higher than it is in this photo. Finally we are closing in on a boat setup that lets us go slow through shallow areas. We can 'putt putt' along in about a foot of water now. There are times when we just don't need the admitted excitement of blasting over unfamiliar rocks and reefs totally dependent upon keeping the boat on plane to avoid disaster. It's difficult to explore when you can't slow down. Well, slowing down isn't the real problem. You can always slow down. It's starting up again that causes the grief in real shallow water.

For some reason we didn't take a lot of photos as we went along the rocky cliff face at Proggin Bay. It's pretty much what you would expect. Very few access points to the water, and difficult to climb up from below. We did see some places we would like to come back to, with natural eddies that collected a lot of flotsam. We like flotsam, usually. It's interesting. We'd probably like jetsam too if we could find any.

We were almost out to the end when we saw a huge spotted ray swimming along just under the surface. Unfortunately by the time I got a camera out and booted up the startled ray had disappeared into the deeper water just off the rocks. Can't always get the photo we want. We had the cameras all put away trying to conserve batteries after all the photos we took at Turtle Rock. We saw a number of interesting looking underwater grottos along Proggin Bay, which are jumbles of boulders and result of the rocks splitting off and tumbling into the water. I suspect it's teeming with marine life with all that underwater structure to hide in. A lot of shady spots to investigate. Just snorkeling this entire stretch could be a fair sized project, and a fun one. I get the feeling not many people bother to come over here. It pretty much requires a boat, like so many of the fun places around here. This day would have been perfect for it if we had started earlier and made that part of the plan. But by this point we had already come to the end of whatever feeble plan we had started with. ("Let's go look at Turtle Rock..") and so we continued onwards without any plan at all. Pretty typical of us. And it's not always been the shiniest example of our decision making processes. I'm thinking that perhaps Dooley the Dogmatist shouldn't get a full vote on these things.



This is approaching Osprey Rock. We've posted so many photos of this place that I'm just including it here as a bench mark. Besides, I thought it was a nice photo with the water so calm. This is the windward side of the rock and the water here is rarely this smooth. There are usually waves crashing against the rocks here.



Judging by the pattern on the rocks it was near low tide.

We still had plenty of afternoon ahead of us, an almost full fuel tank, and no reason to stop. This was one of those photogenic days where the water looks just like a big swimming pool all the way to the horizon. We considered riding up along the beach toward the Amanyara Resort and to see if we could find a specific road I was interested in. I was looking at Google Earth and found a place where it appears we might be able to launch a boat and thought it might be fun to find it from the water. But we decided that this was getting a little too far away for a half day trip. We did nip around the corner to see if there was anything interesting at West Harbour:



This area is normally sheltered from the prevailing winds by the high ridge that terminates at Osprey Rock. The names of many of the shoreline features here evolved from long ago mariner descriptions of the places. Coming into these islands from the southwest, this is one of the first naturally sheltered places on the island of Providenciales.

But we've been here many times. We've shown you photos from up and down this stretch of land, and were not all that keen on doing it over again. The conditions were great for photos, but we really are putting some efforts into finding new views to show you and not just more photos of the same places. So after scratching our collective heads, we remembered that on the charts we've seen of this area there are some shoals marked just off the beach here. We didn't have a chart or GPS with us but thought we'd go see if we could find these shoals. I was fairly sure I could get us close from memory. I spend a lot of time poring over charts . We had never seen Bluff Shoal because normally we avoid shoals on charts. I'm pretty convinced that the major threats to boats do not come from the ocean, but from contact with land. And shoals qualify as land.

Here's how the Bluff Shoal looks on the Wavey Line chart, along with our approximate path to this point in the post:



And by the way, "Wavey Line" is the little company that produces the only paper charts I have been able to find for the Turks and Caicos Islands. I have read that there are some older British Admiralty charts around, someplace, but I have never seen one. And we'd LOVE to have a chart of the area made prior to 1960, so I keep an eye out for one. But in the meantime, Wavey Lines does an excellent job. I have two of their TCI charts, and their Bahamas chart as well. I wrote them about a year ago to see if they had any better charts of the East Caicos area. I am still interested in the old Jacksonville ruins, and getting in and out of that area is pretty tricky looking. Wavey Line was good enough to email me a small section of what map data they actually have on Jacksonville Cut as a .pdf file. Nice folks.

Finding the shoal visually without a chart wasn't that difficult on a day like this. It just looked like more of the seabed around here, only a whole lot shallower. With a depth there at the SW corner of the shoal being 1.8 meters at low tide, I could probably stand on the bottom on a calm day with my bald head just sticking out of the water. Absolutely no threat to our little skiff at all, but I can see why larger boats would want to know about this. Anything drawing over six feet should avoid this spot, of course.



We didn't bother taking many photos, as the bottom was more or less uninteresting to us. We did spot a medium sized nurse shark cruising along, and managed to just barely get it into a video. Unfortunately the camera I grabbed had a big water droplet on the lens, and I didn't realize it. We've read and been told that the nurse sharks are nocturnal. But we keep seeing them in broad daylight, so that simply isn't true.



Not the most exciting shark footage, but 'not very exciting' is okay with us where shark encounters are concerned. It's a little like flying. Who would board a commercial airliner that promised you an exciting flight?

Well, maybe some of us would, I guess.

Did you ever wonder why sharks circle before attacking? One of our readers, "Geauxfishing", explained it to me this way:

Two great white sharks swimming in the ocean spied survivors of a sunken ship. "Follow me son" the father shark said to the son shark and they swam to the mass of people. "First we swim around them a few times with just the tip of our fins showing." And they did. "Well done, son! Now we swim around them a few times with all of our fins showing." And they did. "Now we eat everybody." And they did.

When they were both gorged, the son asked,"Dad, why didn't we just eat them all at first? Why did we swim around and around them?"

His wise father replied, "Because they taste a whole lot better if you empty them out first.!"

Now you know.

And yes, I did change the punchline slightly. We're keeping this particular blog G rated, you know.

So, here we were on the disappointing shoal, with plenty of daylight left. So it made perfect sense to head on over to the next logical spot, West Caicos. That's it under the cloud on the horizon:



Doesn't that water look just perfect for carving up with a boat?
And I think it was at this point that we spotted something reflecting the sun, and shining brightly all the way over on the beach five miles away. It happened sporadically, but there was definitely a flash of light coming from the beach at West Caicos. Well, that was pretty much all the excuse we needed. As if we needed one at all.

So we dunked the Dooley the Daring to cool him off (at his request) and once he was settled in, we headed on over to West Caicos to see what this shiny spot on the beach might be. You just never know around here. It might be something interesting to look at.

You can also see the little camera mount I made for Dooley's life jacket in this photo.



Unfortunately, shortly after this trip his life jacket came apart. The fabric had become weakened due to UV damage, and he currently is without a life jacket or a GoPro mount. So sad to say, there won't be any more Dooley Cam videos until we figure something else out. He says he'll be happy to hold the camera but he keeps forgetting that he doesn't have opposable thumbs and hasn't yet come up with an acceptable workaround for that.

We have a mixed history with West Caicos. The first time we came over here was in our then brand new panga, Cay Lime the first week we had the boat. Well, on that trip we ran out of fuel due to problems with the factory installed fuel gauge. It was SO wrong, and in the wrong direction. As we were to find out, when the fuel gauge read '3/4 ', we were actually on an almost empty tank. I had to swim for it, and physically towed the boat by the bow line for about an hour until I could get it inside the reef in water shallow enough to anchor it. We eventually got a tow into West Caicos harbor. La Gringa found someone who sold us enough fuel to get home. Long story. But that was our first trip to West Caicos.

Our second pass by West Caicos was on the Contender when we made a fishing trip out along the southern edge of the Caicos Bank. We got close enough to get some photos, but never went ashore to look around. So I'm not sure if this one counts as a West Caicos visit. We went out and caught barracuda instead of going ashore there. We didn't want barracuda. But that's what we caught. Nice big feisty ones, if I recall.

Our third trip to West Caicos was in our inflatable kayak. We had fully intended to do some beach combing that time, but our Hobie Mirage Drives started coming apart on us and we basically limped to the beach half crippled. We were very concerned about being able to patch the drives up enough to get home with them, as we had six miles of ocean to cross in a rubber boat. We did go ashore, but only long enough to find some shoestrings to repair the boat with.

So, this is our fourth trip to West Caicos. We were hoping to finally be able to just get out and look around, without having the crisis-du-jour dictating every moment of the experience.

The last time we saw this point of land was in our inflatable kayak on one of those days. This time, thankfully, the boat ran fine, we had plenty of fuel, and there was nothing stopping us. Finally.



The water on the east side of the island is very shallow.



We were homing in on the bright flashes that we saw from time to time on the distant beach. As we got closer to it we could see that there is a large amount of debris washed up on this beach. Wonderful! Just what we've been looking for. You can see some of it in this photo. And I drew an arrow where we were seeing the flash of sunlight. Of course by this time we were determined to go see exactly what caught our attention at sea five miles away.



The water here shallows up to just a few feet deep in many places. There are rock ledges, coral heads, the usual hazards to navigation around here. There are a number of these little underwater sinkhole looking depressions here. I was expecting to see marine life in them, but other than small fish we didn't see anything noteworthy to anyone not interested in marine biology.



Here's a closer look as we went right over the top of one. I was thinking that these would make natural traps for conch crawling across the bottom. But we didn't see any. I'd like to think that conch are smarter than that, but I suspect that this is just not good habitat for them.



We spotted a nice sandy area just off the beach, and perfect for safely anchoring the boat. On a windy day this would not be a good spot as this is normally an area of choppy water in the prevailing trade winds. But so far on this day our luck was holding. We had only the lightest of winds, gently pushing slight swells of water that focused the sunlight into prismatic ripples that wriggled and danced their way across a smooth sandy seafloor. And our mysterious shining goal was just past that point of rock at the beach's edge. We could tell that it was not on the beach itself, but something several feet up on the rocky ledge that lines the entire shore here. That slight elevation above sea level probably explains why we were able to see this flash from so far away.



We dropped the anchor overboard and the crew immediately jumped ship and scrambled ashore for some exploration.



The beach here is littered with wreckage and beachcombing treasures from one end to the other. We saw a lot of planking, and sections of wooden sloop hulls from the many Haitian boats that have been broken up in storms upwind of here. I wish I had known about this when I was looking for netting for the Hobie Tandem Island. There are spots on the beach at West Caicos that are literally strewn with it.



Looking back over the beach back toward Providenciales in the distance. The Sandborne Channel runs between here and Providenciales, and that is the major route for the small container ships and freighters that bring supplies to the island. And just look at all that wonderful beach clutter. This kind of place is better than a lumber yard to me. The wood here has character, and is typically hardwood. I forsee regular trips to this place to search for driftwood and other assorted neat stuff.



Here's a view over the island, showing you the highest points above the sea. It's not what one would call 'mountainous', or 'hilly', or even 'scenic'. I was standing on top of a beach dune, probably ten or twelve feet above the beach when I took this. So the little hills are more than enough to get well above storm surges and waves. The water in the foreground is called "Lake Catherine".



Turning to the right for another photo, I could see the empty buildings of the Molasses Reef development off in the distance. This Ritz-Carleton resort was stopped when the Lehman Brothers financing went the way of all Lehman Brothers financing almost three years ago. We have not been back to that area since our first trip to the harbor there for fuel. We understand that there is no activity there, and hasn't been for several years. There are only a few security guards who spend their days watching over empty buildings sitting in the tropical sun. It must be a peaceful job. West Caicos is very quiet these days.



That has not always been the case here. At one time this island was being used to grow sisal and there are still old railway foundations and an ancient steam engine and building ruins. Those are located at the spot called "Yankee Town". I put an arrow to where the ruins would be if this Google Earth image were correct. It's not correct.



I am almost positive the ruins are north of where Yankee Town is marked on that image. We'll go find out on one of our upcoming trips. When the winds pick up from the east again it will make more sense for us to go explore the other side, and checking out the former Yankee Town will be high on the list. We also want to find the little Maravedi cove in the rocks where the ancient Spanish coin was found some years ago, and there is one other spot we have in mind to explore. It's a strange building further south from where we stopped on this trip. I've heard that it dates from the heyday of the drug smuggling business here back in the 70s', but haven't confirmed that yet. We'll just have to wait until we find out more about it.

Recently we've read rumors of plans to re-start the Molasses Reef project with fresh financing. Well, they certainly shouldn't have any problems portraying the "faded, weather-beaten seaside resort" ambiance if that's what they are looking for. Unfortunately, I don't think that was the original idea.

Here's a view to the south down the beach. We were not equipped for walking much on a rocky beach like this so we only wandered a hundred meters or so in either direction. Just enough to get an idea what kinds of goodies are washed up here.



Oh and there are some goodies. I was finding all kinds of weathered timbers jammed among the rocks and half buried in the sand. I was most interested in looking for hardwood pieces I could use for something I might want to build for the house.

This rocky section is NOT a good barefoot beach, although there are nice sandy stretches not too far in either direction. But the rocks tend to hold on to the stuff that high tides and storms carry in, and that's what we are looking at this trip.



I know all these beach photos look pretty much alike with a cursory glance. But I posted them anyway to show you some of the stuff washed up here. By now you know I am an inveterate beach comber. I would happily spend every day walking the beach looking for treasures big and small.

Just in the hour or so that we spent looking around we saw pieces of several different shipwrecks. I've already posted a photo that showed you a section of wooden hull. In the photo below you should be able to make out an oval shaped cylinder full of flotation foam washed up near the seaweed (and a nice hunk of wood, I now notice..)

Well, upon closer examination we determined that this is a piece of a multihull sailboat. There are several chunks of it scattered along this section of beach, but it is well and truly broken up. I couldn't find enough information to determine any more about it. But golly wouldn't I love to know the story behind it.



I'm hoping that whoever was on the broken up multihull in the background didn't also kick the bucket in the foreground.

Speaking of hulls, I almost forgot to post a photo of the skiff at anchor. Nice sandy spot, and if it got away for some reason (not likely) it would just drift ashore. This is about how far we wandered from where we first hit the beach. You can tell it's not very far. And there are miles of beach here with no competition for salvage. I'm getting greedy-thinking now, aren't I?



That's another hunk of that ill-fated catamaran's hull there in the lower left corner of that photo by the way.

And I just realized that I was about to end the trip to West Caicos report and hadn't told you about the shining object we spotted from way over on Bluff Shoal. After all that, it was just this piece of aluminum shielding on some rigid insulation foam. This is the kind of thing we might expect to see as sound and heat insulation in the engine compartment of something like, oh, say a fiberglass catamaran, as one potential example....



Our trip back to the boat ramp was blessedly uneventful. Just more smooth water, clear skies, and a perfectly functioning boat. Or it was perfectly functioning until I got it on the trailer and pressed the motor tilt button. I had forgotten that after eliminating the jackplate spacer I need to be careful tilting the motor when the jackplate is full down. I snapped both hydraulic steering fittings off the motor. And there are none to be found here. Believe me, I tried. Fortunately a friend found us a couple in Michigan, and the steering is already repaired as I write this.

We did pick up a very few pieces of driftwood type stuff on this trip. The shadows were getting long by the time we finally got the boat home, but I did remember to snap a quick photo of three pieces of wood we brought back with us. A weathered but solid hull plank about 6 feet long, a 4x4 that I think is mahogany, and a little piece of definite mahogany that would make a nice sign. Or something. I'll figure it out as we go. It's nice to find a source of something other than the pressure treated framing lumber that the local lumber yards stock. Usually.



At first I was at a loss about what to do with the old ship plank. Then La Gringa asked me if perhaps I might be able to come up with way to organize the increasing collection of hats we tend to throw on a chair or table when we come into the house. So I thought this might be just the thing.

We liked the weatherbeaten character of the wood, so I decided not to rip this up at all.



I made a dozen pegs out of a nice gray weathered stick I had picked up somewhere. And no, I don't understand this compulsion I seem to have about picking up interesting sticks. But I do recognize it and am keeping an eye on it to see if it develops into anything we should worry about. I clamped the pegs in a vise and chucked up a plug cutter in the little drill press:



Ended up with both thumbs and a dozen of these:



Trimmed the overhanging part off with one of those cool little Japanese style hand saws, and now you can see where I am going with these:



I drilled a dozen holes in the plank, more or less at random, and glued the tightly fitted pegs in.



I bolted it up above one of the doorways, and now when we come into the room it's pretty simple to just grab our hats and hang them up on a peg as we go through. Simple solution, n'est ce pas?



I sliced up the 4x4 mahogany piece we brought back. It was too cracked and worm eaten to make anyting structural, so it's going to become part of a tortilla squisher (tortilladora, for you purists, or a tortilla press for the not-so-pure). And of course I am chomping at the bit to get back over to West Caicos with some decent shoes and gloves and see if I can't bring back some more raw materials. That beach is a gold mine, if you consider old shipwrecked timbers to be of any value. I've got some ideas for some outside furniture made from shipwreck parts, for example.

Next week we have a totally different post planned for a change. No photos of either boat. No sailing. No skiff. This is going to be about driving some back "roads" on Providenciales as we explore a part of the island we've never seen before. There are some beach photos of course. Life here is all about beach.

So, please tune in again next week, when we show you some of what the island looks like away from the local version of civilization. And until then..

A Closer Look at Turtle Rock

In which the Gringos Explore the Islet Underwater, Undergoing Another Change of Plans on a Very Nice Day. Dooley the Devious Claims a Rock while Going With the Flow.

This is going to be a shortish (is that even a word?) follow-up post to that Turtle Rock trip we did a couple of months ago. We tried to get some good photos of Taylor Bay and failed miserably on that day, due to weather. But we've gotten over that. For the most part. Because the good thing that came out of that was that we found Turtle Rock. And if you recall, or even if you don't, I said we'd plan to return someday with some snorkeling equipment. Well, we just did exactly that. And here are the photos for your examination. And perusal. And hopefully, some slight enjoyment.

First I want to put a sunrise photo in here. I don't know why but it's just become sort of a micro tradition kind of thing with us. Does that make me a 'traditionalist'? I guess that sounds better than retro-grouch. Start with a sunrise, end with a sunset. Got a kind of a symmetry to it, or something. Feng-shui? Or as Dooley might say.. Fang-Shoe.

I'm kidding. He hasn't eaten any shoes in years. To my knowledge.

Here's a sunrise directly over the old freighter wreck. I can't get this strange idea out of my head that this is something holding up a cosmic pearl between it's fingers for our examination..



or Godzilla swallowing the sun. Could be that, too.

Maybe we should look at changing that sunset thing up a bit. Maybe put in a close-up photo of a local flower sometimes instead of the same old thing. Now that I think about it, I like this idea of putting some flower photos in from time to time. La Gringa likes taking them and has a good camera for it. And the color is a nice way to start a visual blog like this one. That was how the sunrise thing got started in the first place. I just wanted to have a nice colorful photo right up there at the front of the blog. I could write something like.."This is a Bougainvillea. They grow up the side of the house and have thorns. I have to clip them often, especially during the summer."



I freely admit I'm not much of a 'flower person', despite any rumors you may have heard from the '60's. Being somewhat colorblind, I never paid that much attention to ornamental type plants until we moved here. It wasn't such a big deal when we had no landscaping here on this rock. But we kept adding things, and I have slowly realized that I've somehow gotten myself involved in an ongoing relationship with these growing things. Prior to buying my first hedge trimmer, the only plants I was ever interested in were those I could somehow ingest. Tomatoes, as just one example of the potential joy of horticulture. But now... oh man. I got clippers, loppers, trimmers, three machetes.... and can still barely fight these suckers to a draw. They're not even good to eat and these Bougainvillea are some well-armed rascals, let me tell you. I come away bleeding from most encounters with them. Even though I wear my welding gloves (No, they're not Crocs) while clipping them. Likewise with some of the cactus plants around here. Bending over to double-tap a weed and backing into a Blue Agave plant will reset several of the upper limits of your surprise-response switches. Stabbed in the butt with a sharpened awl at a distracted moment. It will bleed. And sting. And cause you to exercise parts of your vocabulary normally kept dormant. Some people have used these things to sew bark canoes together. I'm just saying.

And this is their prime growing season, right now. All they've been waiting for was more rain, and if you've been reading this blog you know we get it this time of year. The thorny nightmares are growing crazy. The plant kingdom equivalent of Mardi Gras or Carnival, with some of the same morning-after results; the start of a new generation. Of course plants grow all year here, right along with the bugs. And by the way, if you are ever re-incarnated as a bug, I suggest you look into choosing a tropical environment for it. You're going to love it. We are loaded with happy bugs down here. Most of them ignore humans, but not all of them. The wasps are especially serious, but will apparently respect a truce if you leave them alone. Mosquitoes are not all that common here in the western, drier part of the islands. Not enough water, too much wind. But there are some mosquitoes and those gnatty little 'no-see-ems" that seem to consider coconut oil a candy coating.

How did I get off on that rant, anyhow? Probably because I trimmed the bougainvillea yesterday. Only cost me an ounce or two of hemoglobin. Well, back to the point of this post. Our trip back to Turtle Rock. I am not going to post up a bunch more photos of us launching the boat, choogling out of the canal, etc. I'm trying to keep the download time on these posts shorter for you, and besides you've seen all that in previous posts. What I can put up is what it looks like from the perspective of the skiff driver, headed across the Caicos Bank on a nice calm summer day:


Music is 'Groovin' by The Rascals

I was hoping you could see some of the underwater rocks and coral heads we were going over, but the camera was already starting to fog up at that point. We were having a lot of fogging issues with the little video cam. We think we've finally got that under control now, but all we could do at the time was to open up the waterproof case and air it out until the fog disappeared from the inside of the glass outer lens. Then we were good for about fifteen minutes of video before it went all cataract on us again.

This is approaching Turtle Rock from the landward side. That cumulonimbus cloud formation in the background is marking the location of the island of West Caicos, by the way. You can just see it on the horizon. You see, on a normal day, one really doesn't need a compass to navigate on the water here. On the typical Trade Winds Day, every island has its own cloud that stays right over it. It's when these clouds get out of hand and go wandering off that the trouble starts.



When the water is smooth like this every puff of wind puts ripples on the surface. Over the years we've found out that sometimes the ripples actually help to visually navigate around the coral heads and rocks. When the water is glossy like this, it acts like a mirror reflecting the clouds. And like a mirror, it's difficult to see through it at oblique angles. And looking out ahead of the boat is at an oblique angle. In this photo, I wanted to show you how the roughened up water surface works to let us see the rocky bottom underneath. Notice that you can't see much of the bottom detail past the ripples.



It makes navigating interesting sometimes. We try to look a few hundred yards ahead and plan the route to avoid big dark patches under the water. But shadows from passing clouds and areas of ripples that let bottom show through the mirror can sure be confusing. And heading west into the sun in the late afternoon on a day like this..... well... it's like flying IFR if there's a GPS track to follow, but pretty hard if there isn't. The sun reflects off the water right into suddenly seared retinas. We don't worry much about the thousands of uncharted coral heads when we're momentarily blinded in our little boats in open water, but we sure do in the Contender. And near other rocks, like this, there are usually some big pieces that have fallen off just under the surface. I was looking at a chart of this area after we made this trip, and discovered that there is an old submerged shipwreck marked on the shoal surrounding this rock. I need to do my homework before we make these trips. Well, it gives us an excuse to stop back by on another day and look for the wreck.

As we came up around the western side of the rock we startled a few birds who flew off shrieking like they'd been goosed with pine resin and set on fire .



And no doubt Dooley the Delinquent got a visual fix upon from whence they flew. He's good at stuff like that. Pays attention. With a memory an elephant would envy. He still remembers the exact spot where he ambushed an iguana five years ago on Pine Cay. Oh he didn't hurt the big lizard, he just wanted someone to chase through the bush. He would have been perfectly happy to turn around and let the iguana chase him for a while, too. Well, I guess maybe iguanas are kind of standoffish to dogs they haven't been properly introduced to. Or maybe they just panic at the sight of a Jack Russell bearing down on them. He probably looks a lot more threatening from ground level, but in either case they sure don't seem to get into the spirit of the chase and play thing. I am beginning to suspect that their version of it is more like Escape and Evade. But Dooley remembers the grand old time he had tailgating that iguana. And now, every time we pass that spot, we have to let him get off the golf cart and go make sure that yes, the iguana has moved on and does not hang out here just in case some friendly dog should come by and want to race. Poor thing is probably in iguana therapy somewhere.



There's a partial view of our proto-type Dooley Cam mount, too.

We are still in late bird-nesting season here. I think it likely that there are still chicks in some of the nests, and we have no intention of letting Dooley the Destroyer climb the rocks. We're not planning to climb them, either. Our interest today is what's under the water here. I'm not sure we even own the proper footwear for climbing this stuff. I'd really hate to blow out a flip flop on top. I mean, if you blew one out at the bottom you could just turn around and get back to the water with only a modicum of contusions.

At the top.... well this would be a real booger to try to hop down on just the one insulated foot. There are very few shoes more useless than a broken flip flop. They just turn into inefficient flyswatters. Good for scaring small dogs, but as for rock climbing around here they're useless. One approach would be to crawl down on all fours backwards like a double jointed spider with it's belly to the sun. It's more stable, and spreads the pain of that rock/skin interface over a much larger surface area. Makes one look and feel like a bloody fool, though. Literally. No thanks. Never again.



Looking down into the water we saw big schools of small fish swimming around in the lee of the rock. Glossy clear water is great stuff to look through when you're looking straight down. This is a small crowd of a few thousand sardines and their relatives. Or as they call them here, pilchards. I don't mean that relatives are called pilchards. That's another word for sardines. I'll bet there are some other words for relatives, too.

The pilchards are absolutely one of the best native live bait fish we get around here. We have a couple of throw nets specifically for catching these. Maybe we should bring a net out here and do a video. That has the potential for some real laughs.

I didn't tell you guys that La Gringa fell overboard on one of our recent skiff trips. She valiantly restrained from grabbing the new VHF antenna to save herself. Dooley and I maintained a perfect combination of straight, concerned expressions, even after we knew she was all right. But it's my turn, now.

That reminds me, I need to register the boat so we can legally fish from it. I am waiting until July 31, which is when all the fish and boat related licenses here expire. Strangely enough, things like automobile registrations and driver's licenses expire on one's birthday. And it's a real annoying pain to forget until the last minute and then spend a big part of your birthday standing in lines at the Department of Road Stuff.



These were doing that synchronized swimming thing on both sides of the boat. What an excellent place to net bait. Of course this is a seasonal thing.



We eased on up into the protected lee of the rock. There wasn't any wind to speak of on this day, but it's nice to be able to control the boat drift when leaving it on the anchor. And to not let it drift into any rocks while we are off out of sight of it. And there are some submerged rocks here. I'll show you one in a few minutes.

That's an odd phrase for something written, isn't it. It must say something about the concept of time as seen by the writer and the reader. A really fast reader might get there in one minute. A slow one might take a while longer. Someone who reads this a year after it's written will still be only moments away from the submerged rock. And those who only look at the pictures will be there quickest yet, but then they have completely missed the experience of this great sense of anticipation I know you all now have. I'll move on now. My head is starting to throb.

This is the best spot from which to swim into that big cleft that runs between the two main hunks of this rock. We have to swim around that little rock in the foreground.



We just don't mind jumping into this water, at all. It's clear, soothingly warm, shallow enough for wading although we would rather float and not touch anything. Ocean things can bite, sting, and cut. It has big patches of fine, clean sand, some variously colored colonies of coral, and of course, rocks. We decided to hook Dooley up with his video setup and let him swim around the boat, cool off, and then maybe he would calm down and take a nap when we went overboard. Ha.


Music is 'God is Crying' by Joe Satriani

This is where we anchored. We took care not to drop it on that starfish. I never knew they came in Spiderman print.



As we swam away from the skiff toward the rock, I looked back to see how the boat was riding. The bimini we put up to shade Dooley the Dehydratable Brat was catching the slight breezes. With the current, the boat was right where we wanted it to be. I also always check the anchor on the first dive, to be sure it's stuck well enough to hold the boat. But Dooley the Determined doesn't look like he is going to settle for being on anchor watch for very long, does he?



He's one of those crewmen who only follow orders when the Captain is watching, if you know what I mean. And he's never been much of a disciple of delayed gratification.

We circumnavigated the aforementioned rock and flippered into the flooded cleft that roughly bisects the islet. We noticed that the birds had decided we were not the advance forces of a cataclysmic threat after all, and had quietly circled back and landed at their precious little ad hoc aeries. They were keeping an eye on us, but it seemed more one of interest than alarm. I suspect that from their perspective, once we were in the water we were no longer human, if that makes any sense. Upright humans are a threat. Things our size in the tropical oceans don't climb cliffs . I'm just trying to think like a bird brain here. Uh... scratch that. I could have pecked a better metaphor.



This is the view looking back toward the boat. It's on the other side of that rock on the left.



Well, I should have remembered that if I can't see Dooley, then he probably can't see me. This, to him, is an intolerable situation that justifies ignoring previous orders to stay put. He was probably already in the water when I took that photo. He hove into view a few minutes later.

This is looking across to the other, windward side of the rock. From a geological standpoint it's easy to see what happened here. This rock developed into one of those mushroom shapes so common when the ocean erodes the soft limestone and undercuts the side of the rock facing the wind and waves. Eventually, the overhang breaks off and falls into the ocean. This then protects the remaining rock from the wave action until the fallen bit is broken up to the point where it's all underwater again. I suspect this takes quite a while.

See that little bit of exposed rock there in the middle? I got past that by a few feet, face down and snorkeling, when I heard a splashing noise behind me.



This is what was going on to make all the noise:


Music is 'Orbit' by Jesse Cook

And this is the view I had looking at Dooley the Dreadless as he claimed this rock for whatever purposes he came up with. Maybe you can tell from the video, I can't. I'd like to think he was looking for new camera angles, but he refuses to discuss it at all. Typical.



When I watched the video I realized he climbed the rock because it gave him a vantage point where he could keep an eye on both La Gringa and I at the same time. And he does.

Swimming ahead, looking at the rock directly under us this next photo is pretty much what the rock looks like. All kinds of hairy little critters living on it. We try really hard not to touch anything alive. There are plenty of places where there is bare rock, if we needed to stand up for some reason. We prefer to float. It gets deeper off to the right, with numerous little crevices and caves where the sun doesn't shine. I tend to avoid those places.



Now when I saw this one, I thought it would make a cool photo. It's wide enough for me to swim through, and if I had a t-shirt on I would have gone for it. But experience has taught us that even slightly brushing against anything alive on the rocks with bare human shoulder skin is basically a bad idea.



This is what that crack through the rock looks like from the top, above water:



I was using the Olympus Tough 8010 in its underwater housing for these photos. It's got a great feature in that it can be set up for still photos like this but you can push one button and instantly change into video mode. I think all cameras should copy that feature. There were some fish down there in the bottom of this passage:


Music is 'The Storm Sings' by Ottmar Liebert.

I'd mentioned coral, so I thought I would show you at least one photo of some. If I got started on coral photos, we could be here for hours. So I won't.

Oh yeah, there's a fish in this one, too.



Fish are all over the place, of course. I normally don't even bother to take photos of them anymore unless there is something about them that looks interesting. This is just to show you the fish congregating in the deeper water in the shade. It's a crummy photo otherwise.



Here's another crack all the way through the rock to the outside, from just under the surface. And I wouldn't have fit through that one on my skinniest day ever.



La Gringa and Dooley had seen enough sunshine and salt water at this point and they paddled their respective ways back to the boat. I continued on around the seaward side of the rock just to take a look. For the most part it was more of the same. Deeper water, which didn't photo all that well on this day for some reason. I did do a little video of a huge hunk of rock off the face of the islet. It runs up to within a foot of the surface. Man, this could ruin your whole day if you hit it with an outboard at about 30 mph.


Music is 'Never Alone' by Jeff Beck

After I climbed back on board the skiff we were thinking that it was only mid-day, and the weather was so good maybe we shouldn't rush home just yet. I know we've beat the Osprey Rock views over at West Harbour to death on this blog, including photos from every angle and inside the caves. This is probably the best set of those images of Osprey Rock. So I am going going to subject you to a new set of Osprey Rock photos. I'm trying to find new stuff here, ya know. But we did leave Turtle Rock (skipping the nearby Maggot Rock entirely) and went over to cruise that distant shoreline, that ends in Osprey Rock at the end.



And once we got there, we decided we still had plenty of daylight left, and so we decided to head out into the sound to try to find these shoals we had seen on the charts. This was a perfect day to go looking for shoals. And I am going to take the rest of the images we took on this day and make another post with them. I don't plan to make this a serial cliffhanger type of deal here. Not at all. But I know what having forty or fifty images to download does to some people's computers. And we have quite enough for another post.

So, at least this one time, please tune in next week, for another unexciting footnote in the ongoing micro saga of "where we gonna go to scare ourselves silly out on the ocean again this time, Honey?"