When we awoke Saturday morning, the winds in Cienaga de Cholon had died away to nothing. It was flat and still. A general invite had been put out to join everyone aboard one of the larger vessels at 4pm. We were attracted to this but decided, in the end, to leave the bay and explore elsewhere. No doubt we would have learned more about the vessel that was abandoned (which we now know was named Kersti) but we felt that curiosity was not worth losing a days exploration.
The guy who loaned us the charts had indicated a good dive site so we plotted a course there and left the bay around 9:30am. Having cleaned the barnacles off the props we were back to motoring above 6 knots without pushing too hard. The depths were quite inconsistent at times with our charts so we maintained vigilance all the way to our destination. As we approached the destination we realized this was the touristy area where, we believe, the aquarium is situated. There were crowds in the water – exactly what we didn’t want. We had seen a nice little anchorage about a mile to the east so we turned about and headed back there.
The first thing we did after anchoring was to prepare our scuba gear and dinghy out to a nearby dive site marker. The corals here turned out to be particularly interesting showing the most colour variation we had seen. At times the drop off to the deeper water was vertical. We descended to around 70-80 feet and headed north. Later we ascended and made our way back through the coral heads. We both were stung on the face several times by jelly fish larvae but that didn’t detract from the dive.
After lunch we settled down to a lazy afternoon. It was quite hazy so it was ok to be outside in the gentle breeze that was developing. Some locals came by with crabs and crayfish for sale. I ended up buying all four crabs and the two crayfish they had. It was a bit of a rip off as they cunningly kept bringing up the same two crabs making all four look whole. When I examined them later two of the crabs had lost a claw. Nevertheless, the price was much cheaper than back in the US. The crabs were about 2lb each so we figured that in the evening we’d eat one each and save the rest for later. In the end we ate the lot. Delicious.
Today we may hang around here. We’ll explore a little in the dinghy and if we find somewhere nice to move Dignity to we may just do that. Apart from that I may search for one of the nut crackers we used to open up the crabs as it went overboard. I did mark the position with the hand held GPS but the cumulative effect of two 30ft accurate plots gives me a search radius of 60ft. I’ll be lucky to find it. On my side is the fact it’s shiny and silver. If I search near midday I may have a chance.
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