Monday, February 23, 2015

USVI 2015 Day 7, Part 2 - Afternoon Snorkel

OK, it's cold again so I'm going to go back to my Caribbean trip postings - will have to take another break to post about Justine Curgenven's March talk at Sebago (yes, http://THIS Justine, she is coming to visit us all the way out in Canarsie on evening of March 26th) but tonight I want to look at pretty pictures of someplace warm again!

1/22 continued: We had great plans for the evening, but we had a few hours to play with before it was time to go meet our guides for that, and Chase had said that there was great snorkeling around the islet out in the harbor, so we decided to go check it out. Chase said that usually you could see 200 feet, and he'd seen manatees out there; visibility wasn't near that good on this day, and the manatees were elsewhere, but it was still a nice spot, and there were lots of fish, and there were three boobies on a rock, and then there was a beautiful rainbow, and then we went over to a sloop that had been scuttled in the bay a for a quick "wreck dive", and then (and here as I was writing I was laughing to myself because I was sounding like Jacob, who loved to tell stories that went "and then, and then" - boat was mighty quiet without that young man, we missed him!) we came back to the boat and got ready for the most exciting part of the day, a kayak trip on one of the best bioluminescent bays in the world!

TO BE CONTINUED!

Photos from the the afternoon follow. Interesting thing is that I actually didn't take that many snorkeling pictures, I was actually surprised how few underwater pictures I had when I went through them tonight. I think I felt like I'd already taken an awful lot of fish pictures, and sometimes it is good take a break from the picturetaking in favor of actually looking with your eyes - know what I mean? The few that I did take, I was mostly just trying for get better photos of a couple of my favorite kinds here, which happen to be very quick-moving little guys, but lovely - the blue-head wrasse and the tiny but absolutely stunning juvenile yellowtail damselfish, who look like something made by a very skillful jeweler, with their midnight blue bodies flecked with lighter blue spots that look exactly like blue opal chips. 


snorkelstjohn.com has a little more info about the yellowtail damselfish, and some shots that do them much more justice - oh, and I was finally able to ID them using a very well-organized site that TQ found while trying to identify his fish photos, reefguide.org.

No more writing, click on the first photo for a nice slideshow view. 
















 


















1 comment:

LauraEhlers said...

OH man! That tiny little shipwreck looks like the perfect way to begin wreck diving!