Sunday 15 January – Exploring the snorkel spots in Snug Bay

After a morning digesting the Sunday papers we headed out to the little islands nearby looking for a good snorkel spot. The first spot we swum between two islands and saw some pretty coral on the drop off, and a few big fish, which makes a good change. Sadly the the clarity of the water was not great, plus loads of debris, rubbish in the water. When Ari first arrived yesterday he came with his son and we gave them each a coke. I noticed the kid just lobbed the can into the water when he finished drinking it. It’s just their culture, but we told Ari and when he left he put his sail up on the canoe and went and rescued it. The others went and snorkelled near the breaking waves which I don’t like doing, especially if the visibility isn’t great, they did see a ray and a smallish shark resting under some coral. We explored another spot but it wasn’t great visibility.

Snorkel spot between the two islands, we swam through to the breaking waves

Two other boats arrived during the morning at the anchorage, we roared up to the first one in JeldiJeldi to invite them for a drink, and discovered they could not speak English, they were from Spain, so we all smiled politely. Just as we were back on PolePole having an afternoon relax they turned up, a bit early to have drinks, they had a glass of water and we managed to have a bit of a conversation. They are heading back to Colombia to go back to Spain for a while and then are heading to the south coast of Cuba their favourite place, then head down via Guatemala, to the Panama Canal. We had planned to visit Cuba if Covid had not got in the way, it sounds amazing. They are ultimately heading to Baja California which they love, going to live with the whales for a while by the sound of it. They were very sweet, from Galicia.

Ari turned up, he had been slashing the weeds at the cemetery in the morning, the Guna women go daily to respect their ancestors apparently. He brought some molas for us to look at that his mother had made. Stella and I both bought one, at the reasonable price of $15 each. There is so much work that goes into them, we wanted to help him out. They are really short on money, Ari used to work at a lodge which is where he has learnt his good English, but Covid seems to have collapsed the tourist market here. We also gave him my old full face snorkelling mask, which he was very pleased with.

Ari heading home

We are eking out our meat provisions as we are running low, so we had a vegetarian butternut curry for supper. We had hoped to get a fish for supper from all the fishermen, but the fish are so small we can’t bring ourselves to buy them.