Norman Island Bight (2) BVIs

On Friday 3 January we all headed out for another dive, this one on Angelfish Reef, off Caravel Rock on the southwest tip of Norman Island.  The site isn’t visible from the anchorage and, though it is actually closer that The Indians, it feels quite a long way to go in a dinghy.  We were pleased to be in convoy with others.

Top: Caravel Rock, the southwest tip of Norman Island.  Bottom: nearly ready to dive

There’s no dinghy string here, just 2 dive moorings so we tied all the dinghies in a cluster to the nearer one to the reef and prepared to dive.

From the mooring there’s a minute or so swim-in over undulating terrain to get to the end of the reef

Having descended down the mooring line we had a minute’s swim southeast to reach the north side of the reef, which we then followed to out right, around the tip and back east along the south side.

Again, navigation as such wasn’t an issue but the guide map that Carol and Steve had found and which they had copied and laminated for each set of dive buddies, showed 3 clefts, one of which leads to a shallow pool.

Stingray followed by a curious Yellowtail snapper

Identifying the entrances to these clefts wasn’t easy given the lack of scale on the sketch map but we did find them all in the end, with the Stingray pictured above leading the way towards one of them.

Left: Longspine squirrelfish.  Right: Bluestriped grunt (facing right) with French grunt

There was plenty of interesting marine life to see all around the reef……

Various corals including (bottom right) Butterprint brain coral

Top right: Smooth trunkfish.  Bottom left: Longspine squirrelfish.  Bottom right: Whitespotted filefish

…..including back towards the area we had first arrived at following our swim-in.  We circled this area a few times using up the ‘last’ of our air before heading back to the dinghies.

Octopus!

Nicky and I split off from the main group and were lucky enough to see an octopus swimming out in the open, probably more startled to see us than we were to see it!

It hung around and looked at us for a bit and then shot off along the reef, changing colour as it went.  We followed close behind.

Again, it stopped and thought about life a bit….

Making a bid for its den and (bottom right) curled up safe in its hole with just an eye keeping a careful watch on us outside

…..before obviously deciding that discretion was the better part of valour and squeezing into its hole.

Our interaction with the octopus seemed to last for ages but was probably only a minute.  We got several of the others over and pointed out the octopus’ eye in the hole but it wasn’t really a very impressive sight without having seen the rest of it.

After returning from our diving excursion we took the dinghy back around to the west coast of Norman Island, to just behind the headland we were anchored next to.  Here there is a well-known snorkelling site called The Caves and we can testify that it is an incredibly popular site.  Carol and Lisa pointed out several large shoals of Glassy sweepers in one cave and there were plenty of Sergeant majors and other small reef fish.  It was a fun swim but we have snorkelled on better areas.

Once Balou had left, heading to Road Town for supplies and to check out and then on to Grenada, we repositioned BV into her old space.  This gave us a bit more space on the shoreline, given that the wind was forecast to increase somewhat and to come more from northeast.  And in the evening we hosted the remaining crews on board BV and discussed plans for the coming days.  Most of the others needed to go to Road Town for supplies.  However, we still had plenty of food on board from St Martin and so decided that we would head over to the wreck of the RMS Rhone first thing in the morning.

Norman Island Bight, British Virgin Islands