Sailing Log of a Mahe 36: Tobago Cays

We were up early to get some fresh fruit and vegetables before departing from Sheena’s stall and some fresh bread from the baker’s next to Erica’s. We made the short 6 mile hop to Tobago Cays via Palm Island just after breakfast arriving about 11am. Tobago Cays is a horse shoe reef off the east coast of the island of Mayreau which provides a great anchorage over white sand and seagrass with the reef surrounding you to break up the surf. There are four small islets within the reef all with white sand beaches. It is utterly stunning as you arrive, we took one of the substantial mooring buoys provided by the Marine Park to discourage anchoring. We saw a turtle breaking the surface just in front of us as soon as we stopped and we were both soon in the water with mask fins and snorkel to investigate. There were lots of turtles around and you didn’t have to swim far before you saw one either gazing on the grass at the bottom or coming up for a short breath of air before descending again. They didn’t seem too concerned by the many yachts and day boats in the large anchoring area and we had a great swim round watching them before returning to the boat for lunch.

There are lots of boat boys operating in Tobago Cays and we refused fresh lobster, fish, t-shirts etc, though we did buy ice. We also paid our park fees of 10$EC (£2.50) per person and 45$EC (£11) for the mooring buoy to the very helpful and friendly park rangers that visited. I asked them where we could best get to snorkel / dive the reef and he directed me to some pink buoys set up for dingies on the edge of the area. We went straight over that afternoon and spent an hour or so swimming around. The reef was great though only about 2-3m deep it was teaming with lots of fish of many different varieties. It wasn’t really worth getting the dive gear out for but we really enjoyed our snorkelling, Kevin managed to find an octopus and lobster whilst I excelled at taking pictures of fish swimming away! The deeper areas of the reef were either directly in the swell or on the entrance channel and so it wasn’t really suitable to dive from our tender.

We watched the sunset from our cockpit that evening, it’s unusual to have such an all round view at anchor, broken only by a small islets. We could see the lights on in the yachts all around us and another lovely evening onboard under the stars.