The long day yesterday and the jet lag still took its toll. Despite my intentions, I woke up at the late hour of 6:15am, and discovered that it was already quite bright. I made coffee for myself and Arturo, ate some cereal, and then we moved the boat 15 minutes over to the Indians, where we were still the first boat on the national park mooring ball.
By the time we'd finished our boat move, everyone had awakened and were eating breakfast. Arturo went for a snorkel to recall the optimal places for diving, and the rest of us took the chance to go snorkeling as well. The Indians is a fantastic snorkeling site, and the value of being there early was apparent when by 7:30am, every mooring ball was taken.
We got our dive started around 8:30am, and we were finished by around 9:30am. We moved all the dive tanks back in place, and then moved the boat to Key Cay on Peter Island for the dive of the new Willy T wreck. We arrived as another dive boat had divers in the water, but moored our boat with no incident. We asked the dive boat if they had a good dive and they said they did.
Arturo got in the water to snorkel around, and then discovered that the mast of the Willy T's was directly under the La Badine. He looked dubious about the dive, and I had my expectations set low, but we were there, so decided to do the dive anyway. With everyone in the water, we descended and there was the Willy T's, but this time, decorated with pirates of the Caribbean style. The wreck wasn't very old, at most 3-4 years old, but it had had enough time to pick up coral, and quite some wildlife, though it was a bit too deep for the colors to pop in the photos. As predicted by Arturo, we finished the dive because we ran out of things to see long before we ran out of air.
Packing everything away, we motor'd upwind around Peter Island towards Cooper Island. Upon arriving at Cooper Island's Manchioneel Bay, however, we saw that every first come first serve mooring ball was already taken, and every reservable mooring ball was already spoken for. We went past Cistern point to see if there was a place to anchor, but the placement of mooring balls there meant that anchoring was iffy at best. After a failed attempt to drop our anchor I decided it was wiser to raise the sail and sail to Deadman's Bay.
Sailing downwind was easy, and we arrived at Deadman's Bay around 4:00pm, with enough time to go swimming or snorkeling or paddleboarding after parking at a $40 mooring ball. Dinner this time was shrimp with quinoa (we'd discovered that one of the refrigerators didn't work at all, so had to eat the seafood early before it spoiled!), and then some superlative star gazing before bedtime. Our goal the next day was to motor over to the Baths as early as we could wake up.
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