April 27th

Woke up early with the sun. No shades on the boat, might want to bring some of those sissy black eye covers. But why would you want to sleep when you can swim with dolphins. We had a small pod swim close to the boat. I decided to try and pull a sea world but apparently wild dolphins aren’t as personable as you’d think. Plus it is kind of scary. I did get a nice picture though, makes it look like I was close to them. We pulled anchors and headed south towards water cay. Got a little bit of a late start, 10am, but made it there a little after 2pm. We had to pass through Porto Stuck before then. Not fun. The only way you can get a safe passage is to keep a straight bearing from Cay Caulker. It is marked by a crappy little tripod and supposedly a line of sticks. We only counted one. We dropped the jib and motored sailed through the Stuck leaving the tripod 20 yards off our starboard side. It was difficult approaching the pass since all the surrounding cays where low, patchy, and looked the same. Even more difficult was getting around Mapps Cay. This is below Porto Stuck. Here we had the drowned Cays to our portside (cay known for families of Manatees). We had to keep the “slow manatee zone” signs to our starboard and another group of sticks to our port. Oddly enough, no sticks were seen and the signs were damaged. They were broken in a way that the signs were missing leaving the two poles on either side, giving the illusion of two sticks next to each other. Be so, we keep the signs to our portside coming through the pass. It was either my gut instinct or the fancy depth meter reading 4 feet when I realized we were headed straight towards a coral shoal. “Coral Straight ahead”! Turned the engines over and cut it hard port. That was our first close call. We than proceed to pour the drinks and laugh about our near Network News worthy ship wreck, now that it was smooth sailing to Water Cay. We came in close to the SW corner of the cay. Just below a small lagoon. It was about 6 feet of water but we let out a lot of rode to put some distance between us and the island. We had some winged visitors, black flies. Once we backed off, the breeze was nice and kept them off. Steve and I took the dingy into the lagoon which actually carries through to the SE corner of the island. It was an awesome cruise. Water like glass and saw some cool birds. I wish I had a fly rod with me, “A lagoon runs through it”. We came out the other side and took a peak at the next adventure, Goffs Cay. A small spit of sand with a postcard quality cluster of palms. After returning to the boat we cooked up our first meal of veggies, and chicken. The BBQ was a paid in the butt to get started. The wind would blow the heat right off the coals. You could probably see the ball of fire from space with the amount of lighter fluid we used to finally get it going.