It’s been about the snorkeling lately. Manjack Cay has a reef all along the Atlantic side close to the cay. The depths are only about 20-30 feet and the reefs extend up to the surface, most too shallow to even swim over. Each little section is so different from the last. One section had huge elk horn corals all the way to the surface other sections are more dense with fans. They are all spectacular and we haven’t gotten tired of them yet. I have had problems with my underwater camera and wasn’t able to salvage any photos from the first few days of snorkling here, but finally got the other go-pro camera up and running, unfortunately it was very overcast and so not so many photos still. Working on it.
Manjack seems to have a bit of a reputation with sharks, everyone we know, including us, seems to have a “shark story” from here. It’s been pretty tame so far. We did have one reef shark that was quite curious. Keith and I both had our spears pointed at him and he still came up to get a close-up look at Keith as we swam back to the dinghy. I got into the dinghy first. Keith said I splashed too much doing so. My exit from the water into the dinghy is less than graceful to begin with, however the gracefulness factor goes down exponentially depending on the proximity of sharks. Our only other encounter was with three nurse sharks which normally we don’t mind too much. Keith was checking out a hole when three big sharks swam out of a crack one at a time. He saw a grouper in that hole that he wanted to go for it still. I saw one of the sharks circle back (the photo) and told him that I was in the mood for Italian sausage and pasta for dinner 🙂
On the days that the weather was too cloudy to do a lot of diving we took the time to get a few housekeeping type of chores done. We finally scrubbed the green beard of growth off the waterline, scrubbed the hull (underwater), and changed a zinc. We have to have picked up at least half a knot of speed now. I did several bucket loads of laundry. (Note: if you are ever lonely in your anchorage try hanging every piece of underwear that you own out on the lifelines. You might just go from the only boat there to having a whole bay of neighbors. It worked for me!) Keith also spent some time tweaking our battery-state monitor installation. It now tells us what we already knew, we use too much power each day. It has been decided that my array of computer, iPad and camera batteries draw a noticeable amount of power-especially on those cloudy days. We need the sun for those solar panels to work! The cloudy days, at least a few in a row, require the Honda generator to keep up.
Wright Away Sails Away 