Our morning started with an early swim with Chocolate and KTJ. Taking the horses swimming is always a great way to start the day.
After the swim, we headed south for Rincon, planning to have breakfast at La Rosa Ingles - The English Rose. Perched on the edge of one of Rincon's mountains, The English Rose affords a spectacular view and offers a "proper" English breakfast right here in the middle of a (former) Spanish colony.
We drove up the "hill," a drive that rivals any up in the mountains in the center of the island, only to find The English Rose is closed from the middle of May until the second week of June. (Smart people! May is a terribly slow month here for everybody.) We "oooh-ed" and "aaahhhhh-ed" at the view, bemoaned the fact they were closed (the more so because we were really hungry) and headed back down the mountain to the second stop on our adventure.
Straight across Carr. 115 from the road up to The English Rose is the entrance to one of Rincon's best-known surf sites. Officially the beach is called Playa Steps but the surfers all know it as Tres Palmas or just "Tres."
There is a little side-of-the-road trailer at Steps so we fed our hunger with fresh tuna, chicken and pork pinchos.
When the ocean is flat and no waves, Steps is a popular family swimming beach. It is almost exactly in the middle of a Marine Reserve that runs from the beach and marina at Black Eagle in the south to Playa Marias in the north.
We've heard for years that the elkhorn coral in this area is just incredible but neither of us was prepared for what we saw. Here at Shacks ("our" beach at Ola Lola's) we have elkhorn coral the size of dinner tables. At Steps the elkhorn are the size of apartment complexes. Huge, sprawling, and they just keep going, side by side, one after another. Visibility was particularly good so these huge coral colonies loomed in front of us and beside us as we swam. Elaine saw a turtle and we followed biggest parrot fish we've seen in Puerto Rico. It was amazing!
We couldn't help wondering if Shacks might look like this if we and others had successfully created a marine reserve here. A group of us propose it and tried several years ago. There was a lot of support - as long as it didn't infringe on "my" activity, whatever that activity happened to be.
After more than an hour in the water, we headed up to Playa Marias and Calypso, one of our favorite Rincon watering holes. After a couple ice cold beers and a plate of mediocre nachos, we ran into a couple of artist friends who introduced us to a new artist friend. Jay is from the Virgin Islands and paints on coffee bean bags.
Unfortunately, the only photo from this adventure is the one above, Jay's painting of a tortuga , which now hangs proudly at Ola Lola's. That's because yours truly took off on an adventure without checking to see if the camera battery was charged. I guess it's obvious that it was not. So I swam around for an hour with a non-working camera. Ah, well. That's as good an excuse I can think of to go back.
Stay tuned for Rincon Adventure II!
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