Musa the Underwater Museum

We have been in a beautiful anchorage for 5 weeks and now the time has come to lift the hook and chase the next horizon. This is the magic of sailing, when the itch takes hold, there is no need to pack bags, you simply take your whole house with you. I sit here quietly while in full sail the main flying gracefully and the genoa giving a little extra boost, allowing for a very comfortable speed of 5,2 knots, with the peace killers (motors) turned off I can write a new story.

Before we set sail we had to have one more adventure, so another early morning start on Sunday for our final experience of Isla Mujeres, when we woke up around 06:00am it was pouring with rain and rather windy, fortunately we had the sense to pull up the dingy the night before knowing that it was going to rain, so at least it was not full of water. When stepping outside we saw one of our empty diesel cans take flight for a solo adventure, of course now it is a small panic as we need to get it out of the water, scramming to get the dinghy back into the water,  while watching our container float further away, Eric eventually manages to get himself in the dingy and with the rain bucketing down, goes to rescue the container, which was saved and safely secured back on board.

By the time we got to land the rain had let up completely and we took the walk to our meeting location for our final tour, to discover that the side roads have absolutely no drainage whatsoever, at one point the water was almost knee high for me, this was just crazy, obviously many businesses did not open this day.

Our last experiences in Isla Mujeres was to visit the underwater Musa Museum. This was an incredible initiative and consist of more than 500 life size sculptures sitting on the ocean floor, this was created in 2009/2010 to divert divers away from other very fragile reefs, allowing them to thrive. The creation of Musa has provided new habitats for underwater life and fosters new coral growth, this was very evident when we were under the water as we could see the plant life taking hold and hundreds of beautiful fish everywhere. A truly stunning experience. Eric and I are not deep-sea divers yet, although I am starting to think we might trade our snorkel for tanks at some point, as the deeper you go the more beautiful it is.

The surprising thing about this trip is that even the snorkelling takes place out in the open ocean and not in secure areas, together with the deep-sea divers and pretty far from land, some of the areas we were snorkelling the water was very rough so much so that one of the deep-sea divers got very seasick.  This also gave us a good idea of what it would feel like should we end up in rough water unintentionally.

Since this was an early morning trip, we had the rest of the day to get back to our boat and start to prepare some food for our guests that were coming to join us for dinner. We had some lovely crayfish starter compliments of Arzum and Jens, Korean Sojo from John and a good old South African braai (BBQ) finished with a delicious Turkish desert.

 We have met some fantastic sailors here, John our prisoner and his 3 cats, whom we said goodbye to, as he will be staying much longer. Then Arzum, Jens and their doggie Miço on SV Dilly Dally,  will buddy boat with us down to Rio Dolce Guatemala, the total passage is only around 300 nautical miles, however we have decided we will do many stops on the way, at least one more stop on another Mexican island, a few stops in Belize and then down to  Guatemala, most likely it is going to take us quite some time to get there. We don’t intend to stop for very long, maybe just a few days in each place, we will see how it goes, as sailor’s plans are like sandcastles on the beach.

The next 2 days Arzum and I tackled the provisioning task for our vessels, which was great to be doing this with some girl company and the guys were left on the boats hopefully doing boat jobs and not drinking beer.

Provisioning without a car and man hands is a sweaty, heavy, and intense cardio work out. As it is a long walk to the grocery store and a heavy walk back to load the dinghy.

All tasks complete and we were entitled to one last spoil before departure. We treated ourselves to a delicious conch and crayfish ceviche before heading back to our boats to finalize any last-minute tasks, before a 08:00am departure.