Cayo Luis Pena, Spanish Virgin Islands to Isla de Culebra

March 8, 2014

After a hard fought game of Shanghi (card game) last night with Blenda and Tim, my heart was pumping and I had a hard time falling asleep.  It had nothing to do with the boat rolling back and forth, back and forth but I was up until after midnight.  I finally fell asleep about 12:15 a.m. and then at about 1:00 a.m. Daniel wakes up and semi-yells, “it’s raining”!  All the hatches are open.  We hop up, he runs top side and starts closing hatches.  I’m moving slowly but am closing hatches – Blenda opens her stateroom door and says “it’s raining” – we all start mopping up the down pour that came in the hatches.  So, we slept in a little this morning.  We woke up and saw more rain showers in the distance, so we really weren’t in a hurry to move to our next anchorage.  After breakfast, we unleashed ourselves from our mooring ball and did set out for the long trip to Isla de Culebra.    Our friend, Marshall, from a “neighbor sailboat” at the Cooper River Marina, told us – “if you hurry through the Spanish Virgin Islands, I will shoot you”.  So we are taking Marshall’s advice and are going slow.   

It actually took us less than an hour to arrive at Isla de Culebra but it was another wonderful anchorage waiting for us to explore/discover.  It was, at first, another anchorage we had just to ourselves.  Later in the day other people showed up, but it was ours first.  Blenda, Tim and I rowed (actually Tim rowed, Blenda and I acted like princesses and let him row) D-Time ashore (just because we wanted to carry a bunch of stuff to keep dry) otherwise, we would have just swam to shore.  Tim (with Blenda and I following) decided to hike to the top of the closest mountain and after Blenda and I saw it just went “up”, we decided to head back to the beach to just walk the beach.  Where’s Daniel you ask?  He was on board making water and doing laundry.  Somebody has to do it.

After a walk on the beach, I decided to start snorkeling, it was right off the shore and there was a lot to see.  While I was snorkeling, Blenda and Tim were watching a manta ray play close by me.  I never saw it and I’m glad – it would have scared me for sure!   I finally snorkeled back to C-Time to check on the laundry boy but as I’m standing on the back of the boat calling his name, he comes up from behind me,  in the water.  He couldn’t wait to go snorkeling either.  I asked Daniel how’s the snorkeling from the direction he went (because it wasn’t by me) and he said “magnificent”.  Since Daniel doesn’t embellish his descriptions like I do, when he says “magnificent” it MUST be good.  After lunch, the rest of us put our snorkeling gear on and headed out in the direction Daniel had explored and we were not disappointed.  The coral and the abundance of beautiful colorful, large/small fish was just, well, magnificent.  We thoroughly enjoyed our snorkeling adventure today. 

As our anchorage started to get “rolling” again, we decided to move C-Time around to the other side of the island.  There we met up with half a dozen other boats already on their mooring balls.  We picked up the last mooring ball and started grilling dinner.  We enjoyed watching the sunset in the cockpit and listening to some really awesome jazz on the stereo.  Before you knew it, it was shanghi card game time again and I was ready.  Tim and Blenda taught me the rules – there are quite a few – and we played for over an hour.  I really love it. 

 

We are really enjoying have Tim and Blenda on C-Time with us this week and we are really enjoying the Spanish Virgin Islands with them.