Isla de Culebrita, PR -- Bandito Nudito

This morning we dinghied into Dewey, Culebra's only town, with our friends Eli and Marla from "Iguana Dance". Eli and Marla have the same type of boat as ours and have been cruising in this area for several seasons. Although we had never met them before we've been emailing back and forth over the past year or so. Yesterday as we pulled into Culebra we heard them hail someone on the radio and it turned out they were over in the next cove. So we got together for drinks and decided to head into town today for lunch. The ride over to town was a wet one -- straight into wind and waves coming from the east so we were all soaked. But we dried out well enough walking around the town and checking out the boutiques and dive shops. We stopped in at Mamacita's for lunch, which is a place right on the water with a pretty good menu. From our table we could see a huge iguana in the tree next to us that was hungrily eyeballing the lettuce on our hamburgers. There was a sign saying "don't feed the iguanas" so you can tell that this was probably a common occurrence at Mamacita's. Later, as we passed by in the dinghy we saw that the iguana must have made his move because he was now crawling along the deck instead of in the tree and the waitress was frantically shooing him with her apron to get out of the restaurant. Not something you see everyday back home.

Back at the boat we dropped the mooring and motored clockwise around the island of Culebra to a smaller island on the northeast side called Culebrita. In Spanish when you see an -ita or -ito after a word it usually denotes "small" or "tiny". So "Mamacita" means "little mama", and "Culebrita" means "little snake". "Dorito", "Cheeto", and "Frito" all mean pretty much the same thing: tiny tasty corn chip snack. That's the end of today's Spanish lesson.

The cove here has a beautiful soft sand beach and there's a lighthouse you can hike to as well. It amazes me that here in Puerto Rico you can find a spot like this with 7 free moorings and some are still empty, whereas 50 miles away in the British Virgin Islands you'd find a similar cove with 70 moorings for $25/night, packed with boats. The boat right next to us in the cove seemed to be particularly inspired by the natural beauty -- I was sitting in the cockpit watching Kevin snorkel and I look over and there is the guy next door, showering completely au naturel. I've seen lots of men in speedos but this is the first (let's hope for "only") time seeing another cruiser showering completely nude. And absolutely proud of it, judging how he took his time and made sure to give everyone in the anchorage a couple of 360 degree views. Okay bad enough, but then his wife put on a similar show. Mind you, we are not moored next to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. This is an older cruising couple with, well...older cruising couple's bodies. Entertaining? Yes. A turn-on? No. Of course at this point we are looking around to make sure that we aren't in the middle of "The Nudist Regatta" or something and we notice that the guy on the boat on the other side of us is also doing something pretty funny: holding a camera.

Where we are:
Location=Isla Culebrita, PR
Lat=18 19.153
Lon=65 13.651