March 24 Southside Marina, Provo

Sopadilla Bay was beautiful but we quickly became aware that we would not be able to access the grocery store, dive shops or the airport without crazy expensive taxi rides. Southside Marina runs a morning cruiser's net on the radio and in response to our questions, advised us of their very reasonable rates and many services for cruisers, the most interesting to us being that customs/immigration comes to the boat and that they provide their guests with free rides wherever one needs to go. With a big assist from Mike, it didn't take long to reach the inevitable conclusion of that discussion.

Life on the boat. Going to the store. Boys ride in the back.

We went scuba diving yesterday with Caicos Divers. It was a big boat with about 16 other divers on board. That is big crowd but we were very fortunate that with our experience, they did not require us to follow a dive master. We basically used the boat as a ride to the dive sites and the three of us were able to dive in our own group. Both dives were excellent wall dives to about 85 feet in pristine water.

We were sad to send Mike off to the airport today after banana pancakes and fresh mangoes. OK, bacon was involved too but the ill effects of that were canceled out by the orange juice.

For the rest of our trip to Texas, Mike graciously loaned us his "Spot Me", a personal satellite tracker. Rather than sending automatic signals, we are setting it up so that we will send a location signal every 2-3 hours when we are underway or moving to a new anchorage. Check it out here:

http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=01jO48fsx9ND6WJvd9aBHK68Fp0tv63qu

We are leaving the marina in the morning to spend another day at Sopadilla Bay. We plan to passage to the Bahamas on Friday.