We're in Culebra, which means Randy speaks to me in English with an outrageous Spanish accent. Very entertaining.

In 2006, we zoomed through here on our way south, and I only remember two things about Culebra - a huge power yacht blasting awful music in the main anchorage, and scary thunderstorms and waterspouts when we left for the BVI.

This time around I'm happier and more relaxed, the weather is better, and the place is excellent. The town is a lovely size, with just a few nifty shops and groceries and ice. We spent a couple of days in the main harbour, Ensenada Honda. Very good anchorage, flat, with just a wind chop (long fetch with the wind out of the east). Don Street also recommended Bahia de Almodovar as an excellent anchorage, so we picked up a mooring ball there after a day at Culebrita. And it was excellent too - flat calm behind a reef, great breeze, and wonder of wonders, wifi. I always try, no matter how remote we seem to be, because you just never know.

Culebrita, the little island next door, is beautiful - beaches, snorkelling, hikes all over the island. The trails suggest that goats and horses are roaming around, but it wasn't until the second visit that we saw any evidence, and then only poop, and goat noises in the distance. (Also I saw a dead goat just behind the beach, but he'd been dead for a very long time.) Lovely hikes with gentle slopes and mild sorts of hills and dales. There's the ruin of a lighthouse and a large home at the top of the biggest hill, with marble tiled floors and brick and stucco walls. It once must have been very beautiful. There's some evidence that people have tried to make it a party-camp, in spite of the chain link fence (you could drive a truck through a hole in it) and the No Traspassing sign, but there's a large nest of bees or wasps or hornets that seems to have rendered one building out of bounds.

There are mooring balls, three or four or five, in every nice anchorage, and the place is spectacularly uncrowded. No charterers to speak of at anytime, and only on the weekend do the local folk get in their boats and join us on the water, or load up with gear and take a bunch of happy kids to the beach. If it wasn't for hurricane season, we could just plop ourselves down here and get stuck.

Snorkelling in the middle of Tamarindo Bay was very interesting. Not too much in the way of coral or crowds of fish, but a few stunning sightings: a bright orange tulip shell, as long as your hand, displaying a porn-star tongue when Charlie picked it up for a photo op. Lots of the normal black spiny urchins, but we also saw the mothership of urchins - the size of a cabbage, long black spines with bright, almost glowing orange stripes on the body and some sort of eyeball-sized thing perched on top. Very bizarre. Also close encounters with a green turtle and a hawksbill. They seem very tame.

Snorkelling in Tamarindo Grande, one bay north, was... well, we broke into applause when we got back in the dinghy. I shouldn't even tell you about it. For starters, it's right below the dump, the dump that was on fire all night, and still smoking all day. But it's another beautiful bay, lovely beach, hills, all that, and the dump smoking up above. Underwater, OMG, a field of sea fans. Purple, gold, yellow, brown, mauve, more purple, wavy this way, wavy that way. More types of soft corals and hard corals that I could hoist in. Flamingo tongues, schools of blue and purple tangs, dogfish, snappers, angelfish, big parrotfish, a spotted eagle ray and more and more. We snorkelled until we were nearly blue, two days in a row, and when I brushed my teeth before bed last night, I could still see the marks from my mask on my face. Snorkelface - it's an occupational hazard. Silicone hand lotion on the face before the mask goes on can help a bit, but basically, for mature snorkeller, the imprint is with you for hours.

Today, we take a break and go into Culebra for supplies. Eggs, bread, milk, green vegetables, cookies (swimmers need cookies), internet. Laundry, again, will have to be investigated. Perhaps I'll just toss some stuff.

More photos coming when I get a better connection.