We wanted to row around some of the mangroves in Shroud Cay, so we packed up some food and water, our snorkel gear, and set forth in our dingy. The entrance to the creek was near where we were moored and it was a quick row over there. The current was against us to start, and it was a long hard row up the creek. I eventually wore out and Theone took over rowing duty. Rowing against the current is a bit of a fools errand.

The mangroves are such a beautiful area to pass through. We saw lots of sea turtles and a few different types of fish. We rowed to an area where the stream dead ends with a bank that goes over to the ocean side beach. We pulled the dingy up and tied it off and hiked over to a very beautiful ocean side beach. It was a calm day and perfect for some time on the beach. We hiked along it and did some exploring. We were hoping to hike over to an area called the washing machine, but we quickly realized it wasn't really possible from where we were, so we hiked back to the dingy. At that point we realized the dingy was super high and dry and a long hike away from the water. I though we were there around low tide, but I obviously miss calculated that.

So we went back to the beach with our snorkel gear and found a little coral reef there. It doesn't look like anything from land, but once you are in the water it's a whole other world. This by chance ended up being some of the best snorkelling we've ever done. Right in from the beach it opened up into a little deep channel in the reef that we could just swim into. We saw a big Grouper, a ton of different reef fishes, and a couple big schools of fish swam up and along with us which is always amazing. We swam around there for an hour or so, very cool. Got some fun underwater pictures as well.

After that we got back to the dingy, but we were still at low tide (again, I very much miss calculated the tide). We sat around and waited for about an hour until the no-see-ums got bad enough, and then we ended up pulling the dingy a fair ways into deeper water and walking it out to where we could effectively float it and paddle again. We went out a different channel, paddled out to the washing machine area, and then back down the stream to the anchorage.

All in all it was just less that 5 nautical miles of paddling, which deserves a good nights sleep. A long day but well worth it.