21:44.356N  072:17.24W

We left Puerto Rico for the three day passage to the Turks and Caicos Islands which teeter on the edge of a ten mile wide shallow reef.  A new and strange experience for us to sail for so long with so little under the keel.

We had dithered for a couple of hours as to whether to go straight for the Bahamas and changed course at one point to do just that.  We then noticed that the sky was a completely different colour to our right.  A much lighter, brighter blue over where the reef was.  Amazing, so we had to go and have a look.

We dropped the anchor in Sapodilla Bay and went ashore to check in.  We found the main road and within 5 minutes two cars had stopped to ask us directions.  We clearly looked at home. 

First thing was to find a bin.  No bin, but there was a Police Station so Mike called in there to ask where the nearest skip was.  The policeman cheerfully told him not to worry about finding the bin, he would take our rubbish for us.  Now that is service and if our $50 check in and $50 check out fee helps to pay for that then we are happier to pay.

On to the Customs and Immigration who were just as cheerful as the policeman.  They advised us not to bother getting a taxi because they were too expensive but just to walk along the road until a car passed and hooted twice.  We should then wave and the driver would come and pick us up.  These are the illegal taxis driven by Haitian refugees and everyone uses them apparently.  The Customs official telling us this carefully explained that these taxis were illegal but it wasn’t illegal to use one so that is what we should do.

So we did.  We met up with Richard and Clare on Phalarope (named after an ocean going sea bird – yep, we had to ask)  and set off to explore.  Within five minutes we were happily riding along in a very beaten up, very old car and discovering that ‘downtown’ was a small area of newish concrete.  We tried really hard to explain that we would like to see something old.  Our driver even rang a friend who spoke better English than him and it became clear that there was no old.  Perhaps a coffee then.  This we had in a smart, concrete mall.  There was a tourist information centre there who divulged that we could visit an old plantation just up the road.  Behind dilapidated concrete sheds, just next to the very new, very smart hospital was a driveway to a….. closed plantation.  There could not have been much left of it; there wasn’t room.

Not to worry, it was lunchtime and we had been told about a restaurant on the beach that specialised in Conch (pronounced to rhyme with ‘honk’ which takes a bit of getting used to.  First time for Mike and I  and it was delicious.  Squid like if anything and cooked in similar ways.  They are reasonably plentiful and we can pick them up ourselves from the seabed apparently.  The law says that we can have up to six on the boat at any one time.  Maybe if we see one while out snorkelling we will give it a go although cleaning and preparing one seems to be challenging.  We will study this further.

The restaurant didn’t need much in the way of storage because the conch were simply kept in the sea….

Excellent lunch and we headed back. 

We walked to the only piece of raised ground to look over Tashi Delek in the bay and see the rocks that sailors had carved their names into in times past.  Quite a long way past,  these are 1810 and 1821 ….

And this one, 10 May 1707