The day before yesterday we sailed Pitufa back south. Again we got the timing wrong and had a strong current against us, the combination with about 15 to 20 knots of wind with us the resulted in steep, short waves that made the ride quite uncomfortable. Nevertheless it was an exciting trip: we saw a small whale (we think a pilot whale), a school of stingrays surfing down the waves right under the surface and caught the largest fish so far: about 1 m long (we’re not sure what it was, maybe some kind of mackerel). As the fish was far too big for the three of us we shared it in a beach bbq on Casaya with our friends from sy Spruce and sy Iolea.
Yesterday we returned to our favourite spot: Isletas de Platanal. It’s a magical place with an abundance of wildlife. Fish are jumping everywhere, a colony of a few hundred pelicans live on the island and we saw an incredible number of cormorants flying by (more than 10 000 for sure…). From the boat we heard loud grunting sounds, but when we took the dinghy ashore, there was no sign of the seals we had hoped for (we’ll check again today). High up on the beach we found large dugout holes that baffled us, until we discovered a baby turtle in one of them: it’s turtle hatching time and the babies must have dug themselves out of the sand the night before leaving those large holes behind. The poor little guy (about 8 cm long from tail to head) we found was stuck under a root and when we took him to the water he was too weak to swim. We didn’t want to leave him as food for the pelicans, so we took him back to the boat, planning to release him in the cover of the night, but unfortu nately he died in the evening.
The tides are so high at the moment (about 5 m difference, because of the spring tide) that the rocks that bridge the 3 little islands of the Isletas the Platanal stick out high at low tide, but disappear completely at high tide. You want to be extra careful when anchoring in conditions like these–it would be a nasty surprise to sit on the bottom at low tide 
