We collected my Mum from the airport with a taxi driver who had also persuaded us to take one of his mooring buoys shortly after we had anchored in Young Island cut on the south coast of St Vincent.  The sea bed looked like a mixture of sand and sea grass, and ‘Charlie Tango’ approached us and said that the whole area was shortly to become part of the National Park to protect the turtles.  As we are rather fond of turtles, although I couldn’t eat a whole one.., we accepted his offer as he would also take us to the supermarket and on to the airport later that day.  In the taxi we chatted,  Jez asked whether he fishes or not and what he catches, he fished on a regular basis and his main catch was tuna, mahi mahi and TURTLES….Hmm.  These lovely creatures are protected on all islands except St Vincent which makes no sense at all as they migrate thousands of miles, it would appear things are changing though as there was a sign up by the highway on the way to the airport encouraging residents to stop eating turtles and preserve them.

After a peaceful night’s sleep on our ironically turtle friendly mooring buoy, Mum presented us with a very special early joint birthday present – a Gopro with all the attachments!  We were over the moon, now we can capture footage of all the wonderful things we see when snorkelling and diving.  Later that morning we took the dinghy over to Fort Duvernette, just off Young Island. This is a great place to visit, they have a small dinghy dock although the surge and current made it ‘interesting’ getting off. Spectacular views over the Bequia Channel from the top rewarded our hot footed ascent on the renovated stairs cut around the island. The wind howled through the channel and conscious that we hadn’t yet cleared in we thought we ought to sail over to Bequia and get the formalities sorted.