Other sports

I tend to write about and photograph the "ocean sports" - snorkeling, SCUBA diving, surfing, kite surfing - because those are the ones that interest me most.

But there are other sports on the island. Baseball, basketball and volleyball are the most popular on pro and semi-pro levels. Soccer has a small but growing following. We even have a United Soccer League (USL) team, the Islanders, that plays in Bayamon.

Kite surfing is not the only aerial sport either. I spotted these hang gliders (looking more than a little like the Starship Enterprise) riding the currents against the cliff above Middles Beach. These two were soon joined by two more. We see ultralight aircraft, gyro-copters, and paragliders (those things that look like a big parachute with a lawn chair and big fan below them) pretty regularly. On the other side of the island sailing is pretty popular in the San Juan area.

Puerto Rico is one of the few places in the U.S. where cock fighting is legal. It's not as brutal as some places - they don't put blades on the roosters' spurs for example. But it's still hard for our sensibilities to take. We haven't been to a cock fight (yet) but I'm hoping to do a documentary video about them in the near future. We'll let you know.

And, for some, putting ball in a hoop 10 feet off the ground isn't challenging enough. They do it on ONE wheel. Here's a two-on-two game in one of the local neighborhood courts.