Tobago Cays

Sunday 15th November 2009, day 394, 7,321 miles. 12° 37’.88 N, 061° 21’.40 W. Tobago Cays

Everybody should see the Tobago Cays at least once in their life, so they get some idea of what it is like to visit paradise. It’s an aquarium writ large, with turtles, rays, tens of thousands of brightly coloured fish, clear blue water protected by the offshore reefs, tiny islands with white sandy beaches …

The water is swimming pool blue, though I hate to use such a suburban comparison for so pure and natural a phenomenon. What else in nature is that colour? Hyacinth and larkspur have more purple, while the bluest of skies never has that tinge of green. The robes of the Madonna are more subdued, less vibrant. Cornflower blue? No. It’s an almost electric, neon blue, but constantly changing, filled with light and liquid. And the waters, being protected, are teeming with fish. It makes you realise the impact fishing is having everywhere else. Turtles, rays, groupers. A flying gurnard, that looks as if it’s walking on its front fins – perhaps the timid cousin of that first fish that climbed from the sea to the land all those generations ago? A 5ft long barracuda, with its vicious gangster stare. Something large and thuggish, staring out from a hole in the rocks, burping patiently while it waited for something toothsome to pass within reach. A flat round fish, at least 12” diameter, circling us with, as far as is possible, an evil look on his face. What was he protecting from us? Once he opened his mouth to reveal five or six tiny but sharp teeth. Many of the black and white splodged, rectangular trunk fish, their tiny little fins fluttering constantly to stay in place – including one quite close to the surface, which, when I pursue it, turns its ugly face on me as if to say “Yeah? Do you want to make something of it?”

And all the “pretties”: wrasse and damsel fish, sergeant majors, goatfish with their whiskers churning up the sand, butterfly fish, fairy basslets, the rock beauty and the barred hamlet. Shoals of purplish blue tang, the size of an upturned dinner plate, with their smiling gills and surprisingly yellow offspring. The squirrel fish, russet with puppy dog big brown eyes. The multicoloured parrot fish: stoplight, redband and midnight, and the most colourful of them all, the queen triggerfish, gaudily made up with turquoise and yellow lipstick over bright green foundation.

And why aren’t there photos of all these amazingly coloured fish? Our expensive, supposedly waterproof camera is discovered to be leaking. It has waited till the day before we get to the clearest, most fish-filled place in the whole Caribbean to give up. Another irritation is that, for the second time, Anthony’s front tooth pops out while he is snorkelling, and disappears to the bottom where it vanishes into the sand before he has time to see where it went. So he is back to a piratical grin.

We told Tomia before we left Grenada that she would be well advised to throw up any further little problems while we were there, within (relatively) easy reach of two (relatively) well stocked chandleries. Either she wasn’t listening, or has a warped sense of humour (or she can read, a frightening thought) because Anthony spent most of Wednesday dismantling and reassembling the watermaker, having replaced a shower pump the day before, and sorted a loose wire on the engine the day before that. Now we just have to mend a switch for the other shower pump, fix an occasionally leaking seal round a hatch, and find out a way of retrieving a drill bit which fell into the shower drain and remains obstinately out of reach. If we were Danish, she would be in danger of being renamed Jødtaa – Just One Damn Thing After Another. But she has brought us to this beautiful spot, and for that we are grateful.