Blue Lagoon to Manta Ray Bay - 16 57.054S 177 18.816E
Aurora_b
Mike and Liz Downing
Thu 23 Aug 2012 01:32
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We had hoped to stay at the Blue Lagoon until Saturday, but
the weather is not looking so good for the weekend and as we're starting to run
out of time, decided to start heading back south. So it was back to Manta Ray
Bay to have another go at swimming with the manta rays, but this time it was via
the west coast of the island group. So we left through the west pass out of the
Blue Lagoon rather than the southern pass that we followed when coming
in. We thought the west side would be more sheltered and more comfortable than
our rough passage up, although there are more reefs to dodge.
Having developed even better techniques in our use of Google
Earth, we felt we should be able to find our way through the reefs okay.
If its a clear day and the seas are not too rough, reef spotting is not too
difficult. The danger is that you set off and the weather becomes overcast, or
worse, it really closes in with rain. To help combat that we've found
out how to do a bulk export of a whole set of waypoints and input them
to the chart plotter. In addition we now use a new (to us) system that takes
Google Earth pictures and creates a chart that can then be superimposed over the
charts used by OpenCPN, another charting program. So we created Google
Earth charts of the entire route. The advantage of having a bulk
export/import facility means it doesn't matter how many waypoints you have.
(Without the bulk facility each waypoint has to be transferred one at a time
which is a pain on Raymarine chartplotters, so you tend to keep to the
minimum number of waypoints you can get away with.) So for the 20
miles passage we had 32 waypoints, taking us in the middle of every passage
through or around all the reefs. And it all worked - it's a bit like playing a
computer game and then acting it out for real! As it happens, it was a beautiful
day with not a cloud in the sky. What's more, the wind was on or behind the
beam the whole passage, so we sailed virtually all the way and being
sheltered behind the islands on the west side, it was a lovely sail. (The
position for this entry is on the west of the Blue Lagoon, so the Google Earth
track on the blog, shows a slightly different path than the one we came up
on.)
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