18:13.23N 63:04.16W

Saturday 3^rd March

Strange that such a seemingly protected bay (Road Bay, Anguilla) should suffer so much from a general swell running across the prevailing wind, but we rolled quite a bit all night and by morning the increased wind added to the fun.

I nipped ashore to once again do more paperwork with the Customs and Immigration as they had requested, but this turned out to be duff information and they told me to come again to see them on Monday. I pointed out that they might be a little busy then with their royal visitors, but they laughed it off and suggested that it would just be moderate chaos on the beach first thing when Edward and Sophie arrived, but the office should be fine.

So after breakfast we raised the anchor and set off (towing the dinghy) round to Crocus Bay which is only a few miles away.

Anguilla is very protective of its natural resources and their way of doing this is to charge fairly punitive fees to visit their Marine Park and pretty much everywhere other than Road Bay. We chose to spend a couple of days anchored in Crocus Bay which is right next to Little Bay which is part of the park. Because of these fees, the place is not surprisingly pretty empty and we anchored between the only two boats there. This is a very much better protected spot than Road Bay and so we found that despite the 25 knots of wind, we were very comfortable here.

Once we were settled and before lunch, we set off in the dinghy to make our first visit to Little Bay which reads very well in the guide book. We anchored just off a small sandy beach and proceeded to snorkel along the edge of the dramatic cliffs. Sarah found herself swimming with a remarkably relaxed hawksbill turtle, we also saw cuttlefish and all the usual suspects such as parrot fish and wrasses etc. We also saw a kingfisher and a lot of Sarah’s favourite Tropic Birds as well as Pelicans. It was an interesting swim and not short of wildlife, but we did feel that it had fallen rather short of its billing.

In the afternoon we opted to swim along Pelican Point which is the headland between where we are anchored and Little Bay and were rewarded with some really great sights. Sarah found a Lion Fish for us to see and Jo came across a family of at least a dozen lobsters (well  perhaps crayfish) all poking their heads and bits out from under a big overhanging rock – we just couldn’t work out how to take advantage of them. The coral here is better than we have seen pretty much anywhere in the Caribbean and there was a huge variety of fish, which Jo and Sarah then spent most of the evening trying hard to identify using our various books. We returned to Serafina for showers and then took the dinghy back out to the cliffs at Little Bay to watch the Tropic birds, Pelicans and Kingfishers roost. This was rather anti-climactic but we did get up close to the tropic birds and also the pelicans that were perched looking most ungainly , in the branches of the bushes and small trees growing out of the cliff face.

Finally we headed back and watched the sun set although the distant clouds did rather obscure a small but discernible green flash (missed by Jo sadly).