Testigo Grande,
Los Testigos,
Venezuela
11.22.917N
63.08.123W

When the morning dawned, there were islands on the horizon. We had pointed our bow a few degrees south of where our intended destination lay in hopes that the 2-4kt current would lift us up and in the right direction. It did but we tweaked the autopilot a few times after checking our progress on the chart plotter.

On my 2-5am shift I had shaken out the reef as we had been reading a constant 12-14 kts of wind from our aft port quarter. We were flying but Scott Free and Orpailleur were starting to pull away from us; this at least kept us in the pack. A half hour later we started getting gusts up to 25 kts of wind before returning to the 12 kts regular ones. The autopilot did fine at the lower wind speeds but with the higher gusts, I had given it too much sail to handle and it would round us up and then off course. So we ended up hand steering when the wind would gust and then back to the auto pilot when it died back down. I think next time, I’ll just leave it alone and fall behind.

Approaching the Los Testigos islands we had seen flocks of birds circling ahead of us and as we got closer, we saw they were feasting on the fish jumping out of the water. What we hadn’t seen until we were surrounded, were the dolphins. There must have been a hundred of them. They were very dark on the whole but some were mottled, and I swear I saw a couple that looked like they had a red tinge to them. I ran for my camera but was too slow to capture anything.
We dropped our anchors behind the main island of Los Testigos called Testigo Grande, having traveled 99 miles in 13 hours. Not bad at all.

The Los Testigos are small, desert like islands with a very small population of mostly fishermen. However, there is a beautiful white sand beach and runs along the leeward side and this is where we chose to anchor amongst 10 other boats. It is quite deep until you get fairly close to shore but we were able to find a patch of sand in 20’ to sink our anchor in. Once settled and certain that we weren’t going anywhere, we went below and finally got some sleep.

Later in the afternoon, we lowered the dink, collected Gerry & Nicky and explored the little island. There’s not much here and life must be quite extreme for those who do live here. Still, there is a raw beauty in these remote, desolate islands.