Tuesday  April 15^t ,  2014  12 27.5N 61 29.8W

Today's Blog by David (Time zone: BST – 5.0;  UTC – 4.0)

We are at anchor in Tyrrel Bay, ready  to raise the anchor for our final sail of this part of the Odyssey – namely the 35 miles down to the boat yard in Grenada. There we will prepare here for  haul out storage ashore for the Hurricane season.  

On Saturday, we went from Tobago Quays to Petite St Vincent where  had an anchorage entirely to ourselves (unusual in the Caribbean). From there we motored to Union Island and checked out of St Vincent and the Grenadines before sailing down to Carriacou in Sunday.

Quite on the spur of the moment, when we were ambling along the seafront here in Tyrrel Bay,  we chanced into a dive shop run by a couple of enterprising Germans who were prepared to take me diving alone (in other words without another paying customer).  In the event they took Richard along too to keep a watchful eye over us while he snorkelled on the surface.   We dived on the Sisters Rocks and around Mabouya Island.   

Over the course of our journey we have dived in diverse places from Gomera, to Galapagos to Grenada but, truthfully, the coral in and around yesterday’s dive was without compare:

There was also some rare Black Coral, a whole garden of it, although the best picture of it was this single specimen:

A rare Black Coral – confusingly the fronds are  so fine that from a distance the fronds look white!

There was also a multitude of fish – the only sites I recall with more were in the Galapagos. We saw barracuda, many moray eels and Lobster,  several lion fish, the non-indigenous interlopers,  a turtle, a squid, cuttlefish and many shoals of  young fish, swimming for safety in numbers.

A Moray Eel looking for lunch

A Lion Fish lurking in the undergrowth

A couple of Lobsters lolling around

A fish whose name I have forgotten but which I was told to impressed I saw

Of course not all the dangers were below:

A Lesser Norton trying to be nonchalant while keeping a watchful eye over us

Strap On Tools

Finally, I should say that Richard, having clearly developed an inferiority complex while on passage from Bali to Mauritius, decided to take matters into his own hands having arrive in Antigua with his new Strap-On.  In the picture above he is shown using his new Strap On in hands free mode – it is as well that it is something he chooses to do in private!

The strap is enormous – goes right round his chest:

However, even so,  his equipment is probably among the smallest I have seen!   It truly is point and shoot – no manual intervention! You just need to be careful what you are pointing at.

The ideas is that it  makes a video record of wherever you have been looking at while snorkelling.  As ever, in practice, it videos whatever you pointed it at – that, it seems, is not always (ever?) what Richard was  looking at!

That’s it.