20 January Big surf at Cayo San Felipe

We are back in island life once more and it feels good. The water on the south coast of Cuba is crystal clear, so clear that you see the bottom at 18m and when you are in 5m I can see the starfish waving as we pass over.

The approach to Cayo San Juan, one of the line of islands making up Cayo San Felipe is straight forward, you can either pass north or south of an off lying reef patch, but the bottom is marl, old coral and a thin layer of sand. We went in close and dropped our anchor in 3.0m in front of the park rangers building and outside the surf line but it didn't feel quite right. The guide books say holding is marginal and with north easterlies of 20 knots forecast for later tonight we had to make sure we had the best spot available so we hopped in the dinghy and went out with our glass bottom bucket, trusty lead line and GPS.

It was a good call to do the search because we found a large patch of clear sand with 5m of water over it at 21.58.610N 83.37.937W and moved Jackster here. This time I swam to check the anchor and we were buried in pure white sand with 20m of sand to drag through before a lip of rock where the coral and sand marl started. We stayed for two nights and our anchor didn't shift.

We would have liked to go ashore but on the first day there was a dangerous surf breaking on the beach and next day the the surf was done and the wind was up. There weren't any park rangers on the island. We looked with binoculars and didn't see anyone.