Believe me, Little Water Cay is one of those perfect little palm lined cays that you dream of. It's maybe 1/4 of a mile long and lined with palm trees. The water here is spectacularly clear and the biggest problem is finding somewhere to drop the anchor that doesn't impinge on coral heads. It's just lovely!
We had planned on spending an entire day at Glover's reef, but the forecast showed a tropical wave headed our way, and we decided that prudence was the better part of valor. On top of that our dive was just mediocre. I'll chalk the later up to not knowing where to dive, but we diving where all of the dive boats were hanging out. The dive was rather shallow, with lots of surge, but we enjoyed lots of soft coral such as sponges and fan coral. I like deeper wall dives, and it was clear that we weren't far enough shore for that. When we departed with BlueJacket, the wall was clearly visible, but that would have meant anchoring the dinghy in 30+ feet of water. .
When we arrived at Glover's reef, we had 25+ kts of wind. However, over night the wind dropped to the 10 kt range, so we had to motor sail to the Gladden Cut, which goes through the barrier reef. The sails were up purely as stabilizers are we had 6' swells rolling us around. Gladden Cut is huge, so getting through it was no problem. We then worked our way through several other cays and decided to put an additional 5 miles on and go to Laughing Bird Cay. When we got there we saw that 3 charter boats were already there and were rocking and rolling away in 2' seas. The cay was lined perfectly up with the waves and wasn't providing any protection. So we turned around and motored the 5 miles back to Little Water Cay, where we arrived just before sunset. We crept right up to the island to escape the waves wrapping around it and dropped the hook in 10' of water. I had to set the anchor by hand and when I was doing so was amazed at the clarity of the water and the amount of coral near the island (which we luckily missed.) I would have loved to have spent some time there snorkeling.
One thing that really gives a navigator pause is the huge scale of the charts (1:130000), the fact that they don't always line up with reality, and terms such as "Incomplete survey" and "Numerous Coral Heads". Quite often you're in 10-15' of water for extended periods of time and all that you need to ruin your day (and your boat) is a coral head placed in your path. We've been having mid-level grey clouds that make the sky look like it could rain at any time, and it often does. That makes it very hard to read the coral. And for you cruisers, the Rauscher guide has the position of Little Water Cay wrong. Directly off the south side of the island on the line heading to Queens Cay, the position is 16 26.673N 88 05.721W, which is about 1/2 a mile from Rauscher's position. Also, there's a patch reef at approximately 16 27.36N 88 04.31W. Laughing Bird Cay is also incorrectly plotted. The south end of soft coral patch is at 16 26.312N 88 11.977W.
Tomorrow it's on the Cabo Tres Punta, which is in Honduras and is about 2 hours from Livingston, Guatemala where we enter the Rio Dulce.
-- Geoff & Sue
Log ID: 406
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