Here we are about a mile offshore from our next stop.

Don’t know much about Union Island, but it looks fairly uninhabited.

As we were waiting to clear out of Grenada customs in Carriacou this morning, some guys were doing repairs to a wooden fishing boat.

They hammered the planks and then used a planer, chisel, and hatchet to smooth the edges.

We watched them for over an hour. I thought it was interesting. Still doing boat-building like they did thousands of years ago.

At Union Island’s Clifton Bay anchorage we took our dingy into the dingy dock. In order to tie it up, we had to go under the walkway amd push the dingys around until we fit. It is the most crowded dingy dock that we have seen yet. This dingy dock is very convenient to town and where we had to go to clear customs.

Every once in a while, the fish surface as schools, and, when they do, the birds (mostly Pelicans, but others also) come calling.

Today they were doing this frequently right next to the boat. A little unnerving when the birds all appear to be converging on your boat repeatedly.

Today was kind of a slow day – I got the old battery monitor reconfigured in the morning and then got both sump pumps fixed. The afternoon went slowly.

So I thought I would post some pics of fish around our boat. There have been schools of small fish every day around the boat – some of the schools are enormous – thousands. The birds dive bomb the fish which is quite entertaining and every once in a while the schools will all jump out of the water together – quite a sight!

Oh, and the last pic is a good underwater shot of the boat. Keel, rudder and propeller – times two.

These are some screenshots from a longer GoPro video. I’ll try and post more of the video when I get more bandwidth.

Sandy Island is a picture-perfect stretch of sand with palm trees. Probably 200 yards long and 50 yards wide. On either end of the island, there are good reefs that make good snorkeling. While our daughters were visiting, we took them snorkeling.

Quite a bit of different and healthy coral, quite a variety of fish – some in schools, and crystal clear water made it one of the better places we’ve been.

(BTW, in the pics with a lot of black dots, those are fish.)

The underwater sculpture park just north of St. Georges in Grenada is a tourist favorite. We had never been there before, so while my daughters were visiting, we went.

Yes, there were some other people there, but it wasn’t too crowded. We moored the boat a short ways away for the night and then took the dinghy over to the park. We spent at least a half hour at the park and this pic is just one of the underwater sculptures. Interesting idea. I’ll post more of the video if I get a chance and more bandwidth later. This is a screenshot from a GoPro video taken by my youngest daughter.

This was also where the impeller on the dinghy outboard died, but that is another story.

My oldest daughter jumping off the side of the boat (This pic was taken the week between Christmas and New Years when they were visiting – I’m only getting around to posting it now). For some reason, she really loved doing this – to the degree that she talked me into it also. A pic exists of me and her jumping together and we had to do several takes, since I wasn’t looking at the camera properly for several of the shots.

There are also pics of her jumping off the bimini, which is considerably higher off the water. We couldn’t talk her into diving off the bimini, but she did a couple off the side.

My other daughter was quite content to just sit in the water taking pictures and giving commentary on the quality of the dives / jumps.

Several of these structures dotted the countryside of Carriacou. They are remnants of the time when sugar plantations ruled the islands and slave labor processed sugar cane. Our cab driver said that the sugar plantations started in the 17th century. Sugar cane processing and the production of sugar no longer takes place on Carriacou.

Our driver also said that they didn’t have cement to make mortar or concrete during this time so the locals used a combination of limestone and molasses. I’ll take his word for it, but I’ve never heard of that combination as a mortar to bind rocks together.

We took a taxi ride up to Windward, on the north-east shore of Carriacou today. This part of Carriacou is an area of traditional wood boat-building. The driver showed us this boat, which has yet to launch, and also several sailboats that launched recently.

He also took us to the bird sanctuary, where we walked to the beach. He then proceeded to take us on pretty much every road of Carriacou, just to show us around – the airport, the south coast, the hospital (on top of one of the peaks, with old English cannons), an old well where they collected fresh water for their indigo business, and several sites of previous sugar-cane plantations. The island no longer grows sugar cane, but the artifacts from that era are still around.