Culebrita revisited
Salila
Peter Ablett
Sat 25 Feb 2012 19:28
25/2/2012
We left Fajardo in Puerto Rico and made our way straight to Culebrita. It's a fantastic bay with a sandy beach curving around backed by mangroves and bushes, and uninhabited. We had only one other boat for company, and the mooring balls are free.
I finally got to see "The Jacuzzi ". This is a group of rock pools that face the windward coast of the island, and waves pound over the rocks and fill the pools regularly. You can stand in them and be vigorously jostled by the water, great fun.
We'd swum ashore with our stuff in dry bags. These are now called the "less wet than the ocean" bags, and my camera was in a small puddle when I got back. A good excuse to buy that waterproof one I saw in Charlotte Amalie.
And I also took a hike up the hill through the undergrowth to the lighthouse. I'd seen the light shining the night before, but for such a large structure it was very dim. When I got there I discovered why. The pilot book (almost as bad as the PR one) said it was fenced off, well it may have been 10 years previously but it had long since been broken down. The whole magnificent structure had been built in 1880, but was now derelict.
I climbed the crumbling rusty spiral staircase and had a fantastic view for miles around. The original light had long since disappeared, and the cupola roof I later found blown off in the bushes below. The "new" light was solar powered with some large batteries, but it had been mounted on the original cast iron platform. Cast iron and salt spray is a recipe for rust, and so the light is now leaning at 45 degrees, hence it's not very bright from most angles. Aircraft are in the best position to see it...
P
