Walkover Set Bay

We're headed back to our favourite spots, and making efforts to cover those we missed.

Battling to keep up on the blogging front. Watch these spaces for updates and additions. Hopefully you're all on holiday and have a good novel to fill that reading void! I've got a hold of some photos and updated the Puerto Rico blogs, and if you're on insta, add joolspeters for video updates or head to www.instagram.com/joolspeters to see his work. It's a lot of footage so we're about four weeks behind!

Update:

It's been great having the extra company aboard. The extra hands are also pulling their weight; dividing time in the galley, partaking in missions ashore and giving us the option to split into two teams when necessary.

Since new years', time has flown by. We've hit JVD, Virgin Gorda, Anagada then readied about and hailed Cooper, Salt and Norman Islands eventually docking back at Tortola to drop Dave and restock the ship.

A few highlights from the week that was:

The windsurf gear has held together, now ragged but still in very much usable condition. Windguru is in the red from tomorrow on - no doubt one of us will be putting a shoulder through the main panel in due course. We had a cracker of a windsurf in both Gorda and Eustatia Sounds, with cool 18-20kt breezes and flat seas calmed by an outer reef. In the mix was a failed attempt to windsurf from Anagada to Virgin Gorda (14nm), Jools not happy with the dying breeze. I took advantage of more breeze and a slightly shorter distance to tackle Euststatia Sound to Dog Islands. A howler of a downwind rendering me physically useless for much of the day. Cat and Dave added to the returns, with hours of uphauling and not much sailing - credit to both of them for the perseverance under challenging conditions!

Jools and Scott tangoed in a battle of epic proportions with the elusive and, frankly quite frustrating, Anagada lobster. Snorkelling the same reef four times proved fruitless, while the boys made good use of the first aid kit, tending to an ever increasing number of coral cuts. Loblob: 4, boys: 0... for now. I'll note that coral reefs definitely add to the homefield advantage of a lobster, when compared to a rocky surround. This purely because the monolithic mass of rocks offers little more hiding than a superficial crack or overhang. Whereas coral is typically a large network of vacant spaces, tangled in itself and plentiful other reef based organisms. We're increasingly careful with the fields in which we choose to do battle.

The RMS Rhone is such a fantastic dive. I've now done it twice and it is well and truely my favourite dive. Perfect warm, blue, calm water, three swim throughs, one of which into darkness with nothing but silhouettes of fish around you, lobster, turtles, stingrays and sharks, coral everywhere, five seperate sections of ship, I struggle to do it justice with words alone. If you're ever in the area put this at the top of the list.

If you've been missing stories of boat problems you can miss away. Aside from a dodgy fridge and a busted (spare) bilge the new year has been kind to us. Nine days left, here's hoping!

Norman Island again delivered. I personally love this island, it would come in second favourite to Virgin Gorda of all our stops to date. Plus, it's less than an hour from our home port so it's a no brainer either side of call to port. We spent our last night with Dave there and it was another cracker. Crystal blue waters have not yet failed us, visibilty there hasn't been less than 15 meters. We've also taken a liking to the floating bar, Willy T's - which was well and alive this night. We danced, there was drunken tomfoolery incuding more bombs of the top deck, and we gossiped about the eclectic mix of patrons; the very rich, the very high, the very drunk and of course the very local - circling the bar in 17 feet of boat with at least 500 horsepower of unmuffled inboard engine. That night ended in the first three of what, no doubt, will be many cat-splits; the process of rowing dinghy under occupied catamaran, a hilarious combination of stupidity, cheek and silent oarsmanship. The giggling gaggle of five happy to have finally ticked the cat split off the list.Read more