TripSailor.com® Sailing Blogs

Early morning roll call had us off the anchor and back into the beautiful blue in short order. Our fear of the narrow channel behind us, we made great progress under sail toward the Dogs. Our friends the bottle nosed dolphins found us again, this time a pod of 5 delighted the crew with a brief show of water aerobics and led us back to the Sir Francis Drake.

 We dove the area beside the West point of Great Dog in 2002 but we made the choice to try something new and picked up a day mooring at the West end of George Dog. We used the dingy to drop everyone at Kitchen Pt and the moment we got our heads in the water we knew we had made the right choice.  Everyone was pointing and ooing thru their snorkel as one after another found something spectacular to share. A small school of squid passed thru us and led us to a totally healthy green brain coral nestled among the many boulders and other coral formations. As we worked our way back West to the boat we crossed a sandy patch and then another field of deeper, larger formations teeming with schools of all types. Trully a memorable spot!

 Our date with the toilet guys was in control of our schedule this day so we dropped the mooring and high tailed it back to Road Reef and TMM to check on the port side dump tank which was obviously not dumping. David brought us back in and took a small shortcut inside of a few anchored boats. I was at the bow and could see by the keel tracks in the sand that we were headed for trouble but he just thought I was hollering at the pretty view, I guess ‘cause he took us right over it. I held my breath waiting for the sound of sand on keel but the lurching stop never came. He told me later that the depth gauge had read less than our draft as we passed but I guess we must have slid through someone else’s tracks cause we made it OK!

While the TMM guys were poking and proding at the dump valve, the ladies discovered a smaller RiteWay within walking distance and bought a few provisions. One extravagant purchase was met by cheers form all aboard – one half gallon of scrumptious Blue Bell Rocky Road ice cream . . .  ummmmm! We left with a chocolate moustache and an empty holding tank, headed for the nearest anchorage – Little Harbour.

We got over the Drake just in time to get anchored before sunset dropped its orange-red veil. We were joined by only one other – a large Moorings Cat inhabited as best we could tell by only two people. We grilled up some juicy burgers and enjoyed a pleasant night’s sleep (not pumping the backflow out of our john every couple hours).