POSITION 18:17.81N 65:15.25W Bahia de Almodovar, Culebra, PR

Aurelia
Shirley and Michael Webb-Speight
Sun 25 Feb 2007 13:12
This is a perfectly surrounded bay with the reef crossing between the headland and a small mangrove covered islet, and a very narrow entrance on the other side.  It took only an hour to motor here from the main town on Culebra, so we spent the afternoon walking on the reef, snorkeling swimming and scrubbing the underside of the boat. The kids had a great time gathering conch in the shallow water and observing how they can flip themselves over.
S wonders aloud why I am working so hard to clean the bottom when we are being hauled out of the water on Tuesday for new paint.  Quite a reasonable question I suppose.  I had found that by doing the other half when we were at Christmas Island a few days ago we gained half a knot - and were able to keep D'accord behind us all the way down here.  Now we have a clean bottom I am sure we can be competitive with the two larger boats.  Shame that we are splitting up today!
We will need to head back to Ensenada Honda which is the main harbour here on Monday to clear out and pick up our cruising permit.  Once we have that we can come and go from US waters anytime in the next 12 months.  S is feeling very tempted to come back to Puerto Rico - the main town of San Juan is the oldest city in the USA and apparently is well worth the look.  Puerto Rico has regular referendums on whether to become the 51st state or go independent - but in the interim maintains its commonwealth status which provides for some measure of independence.
 
Forgot to mention when we checked into the US Virgins the other day at Cruz Bay we were going back to the boat in the dingy and found 2 dolphins frolicking in the shallow water amongst the moored boats.  Jamie stripped down to undies and dived in, as did Oliver.  They swam very close to them (which they have been DYING to do since we started the trip).  However although they were able to be close to them we realised that they weren't interested in playing with the kids as they were there for other matrimonial activities!  So we fished the kids out of the water and went back to Aurelia!