Snorkeling

We finally had a bright, sunny day and reasonably good weather for snorkeling! It took a while for everyone to get snorkel gear and fins at Caveman Snorkel Tours so we left in boats a little before 11am. On the way out out, they gave us some fish and let us hand feed some frigate birds. If you hold a fish up in the air, the birds will swoop down and take it from you. They are excellent thieves. They don’t swim but they regularly steal food from birds that dive and bring food up to the surface. We also got to feed some terrapin fish. They jump out of the water and take fish out of your hand.

The reef is about a mile away from shore here. You can see the waves breaking over it way out in the ocean. They took us to a shallow spot first where boats bring tourists to feed nurse sharks and rays. There were a lot of sharks and rays. They know to come when they hear the boats and they are completely used to people. We have been seeing mostly gray short-tail stingrays here. It was neat to see them and be so close to them, but it’s also a little artificial since they come to get fed. It’s more interesting to see them in more natural settings.

In the second snorkel location we got to see manatees! That was super neat. My goggles kept fogging up so that wasn’t as good of an experience as I’d hoped but I’m lucky that I got to see them at all. After we finished snorkeling, we also saw them surfacing to breath too.

The water here is as clear and blue as pool water. It’s really amazing. It’s like snorkeling in a super clean aquarium. It almost doesn’t seem real. The corals are really pretty, we saw a lot of brightly colored fish and there are tons of conch shells, and some of them are occupied by mollusks.

We did a half day trip and both Bill and I are glad we didn’t do the full day trip. It was a great trip, but lot of time to be in the sun and water. I had thick 50+ sunscreen but my back is still pretty badly burned. I’ve done a lot of snorkeling but this is the worst burn I’ve had. I would have been completely fried if we had done a full day trip.

It was about 1:30 when we finished so we stopped a Karem’s BBQ before we came back to our apartment. Karem has a tiny food truck with a BBQ grill out front. He and his partner do BBQ and curry. Bill had BBQ pork steak and I had an Afro-Caribbean chicken curry. It’s the best food we’ve had here. We also bought banana break and coconut cake from a street vender and we got chocolate chip cookies and brownies from the chocolate shop. The brownies are delicious!

I was wiped out by the time I got back and took a shower. I fell asleep on the sofa around 4pm and woke up about the time Bill finished making shake-n-bake chicken for supper. I was dead to the world and didn’t even know he had gone down to cook. It’s really nice and much less expensive to eat in sometimes here, especially if someone else is doing the cooking!