Boy its hot here!  We sailed along the west coast and entered Gorda Sound at the north through a buoyed channel surrounded by reefs.  Richard Branson’s island, Necker, is in sight with an amazing house rebuilt after it burned down a couple of years ago during a hurricane - and he also owns Mosquito Island at the entrance to The Sound, which we had originally planned to anchor behind. However on arrival Mosquito Island has quite a bit of building work going on and it didn’t look particularly pretty so we anchored just off Leverick Bay and listened to the Irish Pirate singing at happy hour in the bar and the conch blowing contest!  There are lots of charter boats here, all returning to the marinas and mooring buoys for their evening ashore and so it’s quite noisy.  The water is also very murky so we didn’t swim, instead decided that we would head off out the following day in search of a nicer spot.

So yesterday we had a beautiful sail, circumnavigating Necker Island just for a nose really (and a sail of course), before heading back towards the west coast.

Just as we were passing Mosquito Island Jez spotted a whale in the far distance blowing, but it was too far to see clearly except for the water sprayed in the air, and then they were gone. We watched and watched, nothing.  After about 10 minutes we jumped out of our skins when they surfaced just behind the boat and blow holed!  A panic to get the camera and lots of ‘oh my gaawwwd’s followed, and we were treated to two large whales surfacing and blowing several times before they arched their backs – no tail fluke unfortunately – and deep dived out of sight.  The larger of the two had a very strange dorsal fin, almost deformed and floppy in comparison to the other one. You can just see it on the right in the photo below, the last part of his body is under water and I think he has a white flipper which shows up turquoise blue.  Wow! Thank you god J Two happy sailors!