I know I don’t write for so long and then two blogs in two weeks – what can I say – there ain’t alot to do on Culebra and we are waiting for deliveries (again) and now the weather for heading east is not so good, so we are just hanging again.
This week wasn’t so bad, we shared a hire car with Bill and Jeanette (Sea Lion) on Friday and toured the island (yes the whole island) and it is really beautiful. We started by heading over to Flamenco Beach which I have to say is a nice brochure type beach.

We walked along the white sands to the old dolphin pens to see if we could find any turtles to feed but only found a few roped off nests and a couple of topless bathers. The only thing of real interest to photograph was of course us:

We had a swim in the crystal clear waters and then made our way back to the main beach area and had lunch under a coconut tree. From here we headed back to the other side of the island o near Zoni beach and had a great view of Isla Culebrita, which if time permits we will visit on our way to St Thomas.



From here we drove around looking at a few anchorages including Dakity which is at the entrance to the Dewey Harbour behind a reef and is quite beautiful, but as usual when our pick is stuck we tend to stay put since we also have to keep going into town to check mail, so we stay where we are (only 3 mins to the margaritas at El Batey).

When we arrived back in town we headed to the post office and the yellow card indicating we had a parcel was in the box – but alas the counter was closed so it was back to the boat and wait. At three we headed back in and got our new camera – a Pentax W80 12.1megapixal camera that can be used for underwater photos up to 5m – very cool. We headed to El Batey to have a Margarita to celebrate before heading back to the boat to set it up.

Saturday the new thermostat for the freezer arrived and we spent the day installing that only to realise that there is indeed an intermittent fault with the compressor and the new thermostat did not solve the problem..... Now I need to figure out what to do next.

Sunday – no Post office so we decided to head back to Flamenco beach and take a day of rest. We grabbed a publico in town and for $3 each we arrived at the beach.



It must be remembered that this is the Sunday before the Easter long weekend, but Puerto Ricans honour any public holiday they can, so I think Easter starts officially on Wednesday, but people obviously start arriving here on Saturday the week before because the beach was packed! It bought to mind the second track of Iggy Pops "Naughty Little Doggy" Album that starts something like: “The other day I was walking down   14th Street, It was a beautiful day and the sun was shining, and I found myself surrounded by Latin American dark women, and when I looked at their ankles and their knees and their thighs and the curve of their body.....” but then I thought of the other 80s classic “Can’t touch this” and kept singing that to myself!

Anyway we went for a swim and tried out the new camera – it didn’t leak - and then had some lunch before taking a 25min trek to Carlos Rosario Beach. We asked the man in the office how to get there and he seemed to try and put us off saying it was a long way, hilly track, did we have water? Were we fit? And then pointed towards the gate in the car park and off we went.

The walk was not bad at all and takes you past Tamarind beach which is also nice and totally deserted, but we headed onto Carlos for the snorkelling.

Here we saw colourful tropical fish, squid and even an octopus in the 20 or so minutes we spent in the water – Karen still gets cold even in the luke warm water of the Caribbean. It was cool and as you can see the new camera works a treat!

Well the northern swells are now starting to develop and it isn’t going to be pretty until later in the week (maybe Thursday or Friday) so we are staying put and waiting for our new 2w Alfa wifi adaptor to arrive, which will hopefully be before the swells die down.

Meanwhile we are now running as a green boat! We have been in Culebra for over two weeks and not run any deisel generation! The wind and solar is powering everything including making water and running the washing machine! Ok we are not running the freezer but everything else is going including blogging and watching movies of a night!

Cheers
Matt & Karen