18:19.14N 65:13.71W

Tuesday 6^th May

Well if you really have to give up this wonderful experience of cruising across the world visiting (in our case 45) different countries and meeting so many wonderful people and making so many great friends, Culebrita Island has to be one of the most fitting final locations.

Turtle Beach is a wonderful setting and with a southerly wind blowing it is the calmest anchorage imaginable. A long glorious, palm fringed sandy beach with crystal clear water leading out to the turquoise blue of the lagoon itself, makes this an outstanding final visit.

We arrived in the morning and Sarah chose to walk up to the lighthouse on top of the hill dominating the island before it got too hot.  The old lighthouse was a wonderful structure surrounded by what must have been a rather grand building with amazing black and white marble tiled floors, beautifully laid and still largely intact.  Sarah decided (against advice) to scrabble up the disintegrating cast iron spiral staircase, encountering at the barely 6’ wide summit an enormous bees’ nest emanating out of the hollow top of the staircase – and beat a very hasty retreat.  We then went snorkelling on the coral reef where we found turtles, a shark, a baracuda and a sting ray as well as all the usual suspects!  But more importantly Sarah found a wonderful beach of collectable stones and so in the mid-afternoon she returned in the dinghy to investigate properly.

A few yachts came to join us in the afternoon and unfortunately we were also joined by a good number of worker bees.  It seems like there a good number of these around the island and they seemed desperate for freshwater, so we were reduced to putting up the netting to keep them out of Serafina during the late afternoon and evening. They did however all leave as it got dark which meant we could reclaim the forwards heads which they had invaded after Sarah had had a shower and we had left the hatch open for a while to allow what we had thought to be a single individual out, it  had crawled down the dorade to get at the water.