Saba -- Dive Excursion

Here in Saba, the entire island is surrounded by a Marine Park and you are not allowed to dive without a guide. So yesterday while we were in Windwardside we made arrangements for a dive boat to pick us up and take us on two dives today. The first dive was about 62 feet deep, in an area with lots of patchy corals and some lava rocks. We saw all kinds of sea turtles having lunch on the reef, and we even saw a tiny seahorse clinging to a soft coral. The second dive was a little shallower, but was truly spectacular. We were in wide canyons of coral, with fans and soft corals sticking out everywhere and the place was just teeming with fish. There was even a swim-through passage where you were completely surrounded by walls and a ceiling of coral. The colors were amazing, and Kevin brought the camera along and snapped some great photos, although as you go deeper the color spectrum fades so in some of the photos all the colors wash to blue hues. We'll upload some when we have an internet connection.

When the dive boat returned to our boat we were alarmed to see that the boat was not where we left it! Our hearts stopped. We were still tied to our mooring but it had dragged more than half a mile, literally across the bay! Where the boat ended up was dangerously close to the shore, which was lined with rocks and breaking waves -- we were only about 2 boatlengths (~100 feet) from total disaster. If the boat had dragged any further (and it was still dragging when we got to it) it would've been pounded against the rocks. Luckily the bottom around the island of Saba drops off steeply; we were still in about 20 feet of water. So needless to say we got aboard in a hurry, fired up the engines and dropped the mooring pendant. This is the 2nd time that we have dragged due to a mooring dragging (the other time was in Farmer's Cay, Bahamas). According to the Marine Park handout, these moorings are intended to handle boats up to 60 feet/50 tons. Solstice is a mere 40 feet/7 tons. And it's Murphy's law -- we spend the first 24 hours aboard the boat and we were fine/in the right place according to our GPS/chartplotter. But we leave the boat for less than 6 hours and all of a sudden the boat drags half a mile, even though the wind and swells were considerably calmer than the previous day. It is unbelievable, and we were unbelievably lucky that we didn't lose the boat.