One of the first things that struck me about the Turks and Caicos Islands was the color blue. The sea is seen in incredible shades of blues and greens and turquoises. Herman Melville wrote an entire chapter in Moby Dick about the color white. This is my pictorial on the color blue.
Even the satellite shot has beautiful shades of blue.
The turquoise that is seen in the satellite is what first amazed me about the water here.
Turquoise as far as the eye can see, unless you can see out to the deep water, where it turns to deep blue.
One of the difficulties for Rhapsody in the Turks and Caicos is that the water we were traveling through is shallow, the cause of the wonderful turquoise color. In many places we were sailing in water that is under 9 feet deep. Our keel is 7'2" and so any coral heads sticking up can be disastrous. Fortunately there are shipping channels marked on the charts that we stick to fairly closely, but we still have to "read the water" looking for discolorations that might mean shallower water, or it might only be a passing cloud, sometimes it is hard to tell. I have, on occasion, carefully steered around a cloud shadow, just to be safe! Most of the darker waters in the picture above are cloud shadows, which look remarkably similar to reefs.
This is exiting the Caicos Banks and entering the deep blue waters
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And just enjoying the deep blue color by itself.
As the sun sets the water gradually fades from turquoise to a deep black.
I leave you with a sneak preview of many more blue, underwater pictures to come and a poem, written by a friend while visiting our boat in the US Virgin Islands.
Blue by Adam He
It takes me time
Lapping against the prow
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