We woke up and again got a fairly early start again. Allen’s is cool, but it’s only a few hours away from my favorite beach in the entire world at Shroud Cay. The sail over was completely perfect with fantastic wind, calm seas, and bright teal water. We arrived at Shroud and poked our way all the way up by the island in theoretically enough water at low tide. (More on this later…) The cool thing about the beach at Shroud isn’t even the beach itself, amazing though it is… it’s the ride to get there! The beach is on the ocean side of the island so we took the dinghy down this meandering, crystal clear, blue river through the mangroves until we popped out on the other side. We saw a ton of turtles and a few rays.
There were quite a few other dinghies at the parking spot already and people were playing in the current by diving off the big rock and letting it pull them towards the ocean. The sand here is super soft and feels more like flour. (The actual grains and tiny, round, and uniform. No idea how it’s formed) Jason and I played around in the water a bit and ended up meeting some new friends, Sue and John. On the way back to the boat we saw even more turtles.
Remember I mentioned low tide? Well… on the plus side we’re hilariously close to shore. A few boats came this way seeing us here and then gave up and turned around. (We have a pretty shallow draft for a boat this big) BUT we still hit the bottom. Lol. She swung around a tiny bit and lobbed the tops off of all the little sand mounds and eventually just settled the keel down into the sand. No big deal but it is kind of funny and partly why we chose this boat. She’s sturdy!
We ended up going over to Sue and John’s boat to help them troubleshoot their watermaker since we just installed and commissioned ours. Turns out they have a similar model to ours but the previous owner did some weird shit installing it. No wonder nothing matched their manual! It literally just wasn’t there! We figured it out and got it running for them though. I even drew them a new diagram with what their system is actually doing. It’s nice to be able to help people!
Eventually we made it back to our boat and turned on our underwater light. The only thing to show up was a single large squid. It was hunting tiny fish by pretending to be a piece of seaweed or grass. It would float around the fish with its tentacles up and waving around to look like weeds and once the fish stopped noticing it it would turn its tentacles into a spear shape and go in for the kill. Super cool to watch.