Isla Carenero,
Los Roques,

Venezuela
11.53.111N
66.50.697W

A chorus line of seagulls lined up along our back arch at the crack of down this morning and proceeded to screech and squawk for attention. I’m not sure if they thought we were going to feed them or what. Instead, they had a banshee come looming up out of the companionway waving her arms and screeching right back at them. They were perched over the dinghy cover Dale had just washed all the tuna blood out of the other day and I didn’t figure he wanted to repeat the process to get gull guano off the sides.

Since I was up, I sat in the cockpit and watched the flocks of pelicans, gulls and terns diving for fish along the reefs. About 7:30, a fisherman came through the anchorage with his catch of lobster. He stopped by Orpailleur and through all of the hand waving, I could tell that Gerry was negotiating a price based upon the idea that the fisherman had to cut the tails off first. Apparently, they did not come to an agreement.

The fisherman moved on to the next two boats and by the time he got to us, his selection was rather small. Still Dale swapped a bottle of red wine (the white was refused) for 3 small lobsters. This was after they could not agree upon a dollar price once the lobsterman found out we didn’t have any Bolivars. I’m sure we all felt we got a good deal.

After breakfast, Dale & I took the dink over to the next cove to explore and ended up with a simple photo op with a few pelicans in the area. We returned to the Palace and donned our snorkel gear. There was a small reef off the back of our boat, so we paddled over and spent the next couple of hours fascinated with all of the fish. There were 100’s of large bonefish that swam by us; 1000’s of silversides, schools of several varieties of parrotfish, and the usual assortment of reef fish. A couple of small barracuda made sure we didn’t wander too far and an octopus helped by keeping a couple of beady eyes on us. Dale spotted a burr fish in the rocks and I snapped about half of his green eyes watching us warily in a photograph. If it hadn’t been for the fact that we were getting cold, I think we could have spent the whole day there swimming around the coral heads and seeing who lived in the broken bottle on the bottom.

We returned to the Palace and warmed ourselves in the sun after radioing Orpailleur to tell them that a great snorkeling spot lay just off their stern.

Later, Dale took the lobsters over to the beach and cleaned them for dinner. Gerry & Nicky joined us for the grilled dinner adding Thai chicken to the feast.

The next leg of our adventure will take us to the Aves (Ahh veys). After much discussion, we adjusted our previous thought of leaving at 9am, to leaving at 8am, so that we are certain to have good light to enter another “poorly charted“, “reef-studded” island group. Never a dull moment. At least it’s a simple day trip.