We arrived safely in the Caicos Islands at Turtle Cove Marina, although we had to anchor off the marina in crystal clear waters until the tide rose another foot before we could enter. The tide in this part of the world is about three feet instead of the nine inches in the Caribbean.

Providentiales is a bit like Orfordness, flat and stony, but with the odd bush and palm tree. It is about thirty miles long by one mile wide, and on the South side is the most amazing azure sea, which stretches as far as the eye can see. The only problem (for us) is that it is only about ten feet deep at the most, which gives it its beautiful colour. The island is being developed into a holiday retreat for Americans, and property prices, although presently about on par with South East England, (or Edinburgh) are rising at an alarming rate.

We met some really nice people who were also staying in the marina and we were treated to a tour of a super yacht moored nearby with hospitable Australian crew. We hope to see them again. Our immediate neighbours were a delightful American couple on a 36 foot boat similar to an island packet. They had their dog booboo on the boat with them. She looked a bit like a black sheep and had a lovely nature. We were sorry we couldn’t have brought Ben with us since they seem to be quite pet orientated in this area. We were taken to the local supermarket in our neighbour, Chris’ hire care. It was more like Harrods food hall than Safeways and is positively the best we have been to since Britain. We bought a wireless card for the computer and, coverage permitting, should now be able to surf the net for very little money, provided we are within range of a transmitter. (This has only proved to be the case once in the last four weeks!!).

Despite Providentiales (capital island of Caicos) looking like a cross between the Essex Marshes and the sand dunes near Buckie, we hired a car for a better look. We went to the only conch (pronounced like the nose, or rhymes with ‘bonk’ as one guidebook says!) farm in the world. The Conch produces the most beautiful shell about a foot long. The meat itself is a bit chewy and needs tenderising with a mallet, but is quite tasty. They are exported to Florida and the states, and the shells are used locally for jewellery and for making worktops for kitchens and bathrooms. The shells are also sold for their own sake and are very pretty.

We saw flamingos in the middle of a marshy lagoon. They were very pink and obviously would have been excellent for playing croquet with since they had tremendously long necks. We didn’t see the Queen of Hearts there though!

We went diving and swam through a gulley to reach the ‘drop off’, a wall of rock that descended 1000’. Emerging from the gulley Susan saw six spotted Eagle Rays flying by above the abyss.

They were indeed a regal sight with the slow flapping of their ‘wings’. We saw reef sharks, moray eels and lobsters. This time Will was congratulated on his calm technique by the guide. He has obviously stopped thrashing around and learnt from Susan!

On our departure we were waved goodbye by an osprey sitting on the sign for the Marina! He was sitting almost as a bald eagle is portrayed in the American emblem. He didn’t even move as we passed.

Within minutes we had a bottlenose dolphin also escorting us out. Despite the rather drab landscape of the Turks and Caicos they were really interesting for their wildlife and seascapes, and will be forever memorable for the really decent co visitors that we met.

We anchored off some deserted islands at the southern end of the Bahamas trying to find our way to a port of entry. It was three days and one nights good sailing in 15 knots South Easterly from the southern end of the Bahamas before we came to a port of entry where we could present our passports! All the islands of the Bahamas are similar to the Turks and Caicos, expect perhaps Cat Island where we presented our passports to a very pleasant customs man (immigration officer/policeman etc). Cat Island has a ‘mountain’ at its centre over 120’ above sea level. On it is built a small hermitage with a chapel and a bell tower and two small cells for sleeping and eating. The hermitage was built early in the 20th century by a famous Catholic priest, father Jerome, who has been an Anglican priest, and previous to that an architect! He had built both an Anglican church and a Roman Catholic church of stone at Georgetown on the adjacent island of Great Exuma before retiring to Cat Island, which is also his final resting place, close to the hermitage.

The exercise did us good walking up the hill between rocks and cacti with the odd cleared area for corn and berry bushes. Before the emancipation of slavery in 1834 there used to be large estates here growing cotton and we met the descendent of one of the planters who ran a small restaurant and made hats from coloured seizle. She was a delightful, friendly, lady, who gave us some of her Conch salad, a spicy, chewy, but tasty dish. We bought a blue hat from her for Susan, at a very reasonable price. Susan now has a paper hat and a straw hat, obviously all for inside use or they would waste away in the rain. (not that we have seen much).

We sailed to the Exuma Cays (pronounced Keys), which are again flat and sandy, and spent the night at Farmers Cay, although how they could farm a rocky island the size of Inch Keith covered in fifty houses, is beyond us. The snorkeling was like cruising around a beautiful garden with sponges, ferns, corals, lobsters and colourful fish galore.

Another day, and another flat sandy island later, saw us at Allan’s Cay, which has iguanas as its only inhabitants.

They are herbivores and descendants of the dinosaur age. They are very inquisitive and come down to the beach when the dinghy lands. They nod their heads vigorously, probably to tell you politely it’s their island but you can have a look if you want. We did, and felt like Ben Gunn looking past the reefs and azure sea for a passing ship. There were quite a number of boats, including a man in a canoe playing rollovers in the six knot tide between the islands.

The main reason for us visiting the Bahamas, and for paying the exorbitant cruising fee of $300, was to go to the American Embassy in Nassau to gain an American visa so we could visit the United States. It seems completely daft to us that you can fly into the States from Scotland without a visa, but if you take your own yacht you need one! They were wonderful at the American Embassy and we could not have been better or more helpfully treated. We had lunch at a pirate themed pub, which has an excellent exhibition of pirates.

Nassau was the pirate capital in the golden age of piracy, between 1680 and 1730. Most of the pirates came to an ugly end on a rope, although a few had been pardoned as amnesties were called, in order that governments (mostly British) could massage the piracy figures!! Most pirates used the colonies in the Americas as legal bases when they were in action, since it was a good place to sell their ‘wares’! One of the last, and most vicious of pirates, Blackbeard (Edward Teach), was caught by the royal navy in a creek off the American Intracostal Waterways. His head was cut off and hung from the bowsprit of his conquerors ship. His headless body is supposed to have swum five times around the ship before sinking! It is true that his body had five pistol shots and twenty cutlass cuts before his soul sank to hell.

Nassau is now a modern bustling city with delightful colonial buildings and modern American mansions and hotels. One particular hotel, Atlantis, has as its theme the mythological lost city.

One of its thirty restaurants has a glass wall 100’ long with fallen stone columns and stone paving behind, all underwater. The aquarium houses five foot black tip sharks, eagle rays, manta rays, lobsters, tuna, blue tang and all the other reef fish, just swimming about within a foot of the glass. We didn’t have to spend all that money learning to dive, we could have just sat in the casino and restaurant and watched the fishes in the tank! Nice though they were, there is nothing to beat the sensation of floating in space, which is how you feel swimming underwater. We discovered later that that is how they train the astronauts to walk in space (underwater).

We sailed to palm beach in Florida to enter the ICW (IntraCostal Waterways of the East coast of the United States of America). Our cruising permit cost us $19 when we arrived, which came as a pleasant surprise.

We are most grateful to Ken and Anne Gumley for lending us their charts and pilots of the Bahamas and the ICW. They have been invaluable.

Close to our entry to the waterways we stopped at the John F Kennedy Space Centre, or Cape Canaveral to some of us. The exhibitions are excellent and include many of the rockets used and space capsules that have been to the moon. Despite the size of the rockets and the space shuttle it is amazing that the astronauts lived (and still live on the space shuttle) in a shoebox! Gerry, who has a vagabond (similar to Atlantia) and who kindly transported us to the space centre from the marina, used to work on the space shuttle before seeing the light and working on his own boat. An astronaut friend once told him that flying the shuttle was like being locked in the restroom with six of your best buddies for a week. We think we would rather be on the yacht Atlantia than the space shuttle Atlantis, although we don’t usually have our feet on the ceiling!

The ICW in Florida is like travelling through one long Potter Heigham on the Norfolk Broads. The houses are rather newer and grander however, and the water generally over seven feet deep. This is just as well since Atlantia draws 7 feet. We have only been aground about four times, and once we had to wait three hours until the tide rose a foot. That was Will’s birthday treat (but it was his fault in the first place). The tide rises between three inches and three feet, depending on whether one is close to a river outlet or not. In Florida these occur every fifty miles or so, but in Georgia, where we have now reached, the rivers occur every twenty miles with huge tracts of marshland between, with the odd island covered with beautiful pine woods rising above the marshland grasses. It is like floating through the Naze in Essex for days on end!

The upside of this marshland wilderness is the fantastic wildlife.

Dolphins at every turn of the river, turkey vultures, ospreys and bald eagles soaring above the flat marshes, which sometimes stretch as far as the eye can see. White herons and grey herons are poised to spear a fish beside the reeds, and pelicans splash into the water to extend the pouches below their bills as they swallow their catch. There were even some magnificent frigate birds wheeling around in the Palm Beach area. The downside is that there are no internet cafes out there and our phones don’t work on the American system yet. Also, the weather, which has been sunny since the Turks and Caicos is now all dramatic, with thunder and lightning. We had a tremendous son et lumiere last night watched from the depth and, usual, tranquillity of the marshes. Fortunately the storm was twenty miles away over the higher land.

We have now reached Savannah. An enormous city of 550,000 people in the depths of Georgia. It was the home to the yachting fraternity during the Atlanta Olympics, and is the oldest planned city in the South of the Untied States. It was founded by a Mr. Oglethorpe of Britain in the mid eighteenth century and has some very impressive architecture from colonial times, and rich expansive times during the nineteenth century.

The pony express must get through. Hopefully you will receive this letter from a Savannah shopping centre tomorrow.

We hope you like the small selection of Susan’s snaps, which include our trip to space (look carefully to see who has the magnetic boots and who is sitting on the ceiling of the shuttle cockpit)!

Love to all Atlantia