Turtles, Turtles, Turtles

Woke up this morning to a shout outside the boat. It was Mr. Quality, bobbing up and down in the waves in his white powerboat which was festooned with enough fenders to make it look like the Michelin man. He handed us a bag with warm banana bread and fresh baguettes. What a way to start the day.

Mr. Quality was a one man Costco with bread, t-shirts, and other items.

While enjoying the fresh bread in the cockpit, we marveled at the number of boats around us, many of whom were catamarans in charter service. As Mr. Quality said the day before, the anchorage was “empty” compared to peak season.

Our goal today was to explore nearby Baradel Island and swim with the turtles. As mentioned in an earlier post, the Tobago Cays are a national park and patrolled by rangers who protect the local flora and fauna. That’s why the water is crystal clear and the islands fairly pristine.

Baradel Island with Horseshoe Reef in the background. The turtle sanctuary is just this side of the sandpit.

We dingied over to the massive Horseshoe Reef that protects the Tobago Cays from the relentless easterly trade winds and waves. It’s a very shallow reef so snorkeling was a challenge at times, with me sucking up my keel-like stomach as I glided over the coral formations. We saw lots of fish, but it wasn’t in the category of spectacular snorkeling that we had up in the Bahamas. We landed the dingy on a large sandpit at Baradel Island, complete with the requisite topless French women, and took a short hike up to the top of the island. On the way we saw a large box turtle who was being relentlessly pursued by a Frenchman with a huge camera, and later on a large iguana that seemed somewhat disinterested in us (yea, just wait until the French paparazzi show up, I thought). The view from the top was spectacular, with the Horseshoe Reef surrounding the islands and diminishing the waves to mere ripples.

Next we donned our snorkeling gear and headed out into a large roped-off lagoon whose bottom was covered with sea grass. With the bland sandy/grassy bottom we were somewhat disappointed until a smallish turtle quietly glided by on my right. The turtles were habituated to humans so we could slowly swim alongside them as they slowly dove to the bottom, grazed on the sea grass, then slowly ascended to get a gulp of air. Soon there were two turtles in our field of vision, then a third went by on our left. As Jimmy Buffet would say: Their were turtles to the left, turtles to the right . . “ We think the area is a natural turtle nursery given the sheer number of turtles we saw. Based on our little plastic fish i.d. cards, we think the turtles were either Atlantic Green Sea Turtles or maybe Hawksbill Sea Turtles, both of which are endangered species (If there are any turtle experts out there look at the video and leave a comment on the blog). We spent a wonderful hour just gliding alongside the turtles who watched us in their peripheral vision. We wondered what they must be thinking (“Well, at least it’s not that damn French paparazzi.”)

Back at the boat we showered off on the transom and just lazed in the cockpit for the rest of the day. We had a VHF radio call that our friends Marce and Jack on Escape Velocity were on their way. Will be great to have friends around once again to go explore the other islands.

With nothing currently broken on the boat we could just sit back, sip a rum punch, munch on some banana bread, read a book (Jimmy Buffet’s A Salty Piece of Land), and just relax. This is what cruising is supposed to be like.