BlueField Range

Saturday, March 6, 2004

017-13.740 N
088-5.400 W

Ahoy from the Bluefield Range, which are a set of small cays SE of Belize City!

First off I want to apologize for the mistake in yesterday's title. I said, "Middle Long Cay, Bluefield Range" and I got a ton of mail from people stating that Middle Long Cay wasn't part of the Bluefield Range. :-) You're right, it's next to them, but not part of them. Thanks for clarifying that!

But now we're in the Bluefield Range. We were going to depart for the Turneffe Island yesterday, but we listened to radio reports from other boats who had departed, and they were either pulling back in or were pulling into somewhere nearby to get out of the winds. The winds, which were supposed to have dropped to 15-20 kts were blowing 25+ kts. It just didn't make sense to move far.

We decided to continue our exploration of the cays off of Belize. Hey, it's something to do and it's always nice to have a good working knowledge of the various anchorages. We moved about 1.5 miles S to the Bluefield range. Sovereign, a 54' Masse which had been anchored to us the night before, departed for Mexico and turned back and anchored over there. We called over to them and they gave us waypoints through the reef.

This is another wonderful anchorage with lots of protection from shallow reefs and mangrove cays. Some people say that they'd ride out a north'r here, but I'm not sure that I'd go that far. According to people who have spent time here, there are manatees who live here. We took a lengthy trip around here looking for a good place to snorkel or the manatees and found neither.

The winds relaxed last night and we're *really* going to move to Turneffe or Lighthouse Reef today. Really!

-- Geoff & Sue

For the cruiser, here are the waypoints that we used to get in. With good light you can easily see the reef and the cut.

17-14.447N 88-05.985W Setup for entrance

17-14.315N 88-05.445W Midpoint between cut in reef.

17-13.868N 88-05.429W West of sandbar. Anchor S of here.
Log ID: 464

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