Cane Garden Bay, Tortola, BVI

Another day of inter netting, swimming, snorkelling etc. I should mention the wildlife surrounding us even in this well used anchorage. There are we think three individual turtles which seem to be quite territorial and spend all day feeding on the bottom surrounding the boat. There are two larger and one smaller and we see them several times a day surfacing nearby to the boat. It is great to watch the wildlife over a longer period and see their routines…

One of regular turtle visitors, less than 5m from the boat

Well except perhaps for the gulls. Since we arrived in Cane Garden Bay a flock of gulls have arrived that we had never seen in our time in the Caribbean so far. We are informed since by Jean that they are migratory and come back each April. They are really loud and gather several times a day in large groups to squawk together. If the local boaters are lucky this will be harmless on the water somewhere in the bay. Otherwise it will be on someone’s dingy, who will come back to it later to find the presents they have left behind! We have seen about 15 lining each side of a dingy left tied behind overnight. We are careful to lift our dingy each night, but are now seen several times a day going to the bows waves hands making shooing noises to our regular visitors there which despite our efforts have already managed to leave a few calling cards.

Gull invasion

Finally, the local pelican population is really strong, there must be about 15 resident to the bay who are seen making their ungainly dives into the water throughout the day. There was one sat quite undisturbed on a dingy at the dock when we arrived the other day who looked at us disdainfully (I’d of course forgotten the camera) but refused to budge.

This evening just after we had gone bed we were awoken by a thud just above our heads. You get quite good at recognising noises and we both recognised that it sounded like a muffled rubber dingy rebound on the sugar scoop. We leapt up into the saloon in time to see the Irish group (red and white striped of the newly arrived) we had seen moor beside us on the 48ft Fountaine Pajot Salina that afternoon returning to their boat by dingy! Both boats look very similar from the front and it had clearly been a mistaken identity problem. We were quite pleased to be mistaken for the larger and considerably more expensive sister ship albeit by drunken Irishmen. No harm done anyway. We’d actually had a similar incident a couple of nights before when Kevin got up because he could hear voices. When he switched on the lights in the saloon it turned out to be a fairly drunken couple in a dingy hanging on to our anchor chain, who identified with slightly slurred speech that this must not be their boat after all when the lights went on.