Night dive

Scuba diving at night is a whole different animal! There is the obvious - it's dark and your field of vision is limited to the width of the beam of your dive light, like your field of vision when driving at night is limited to the width of your headlight beams. Among other things, this narrow field of vision forces you to look closely for the smaller things.

Things look different at night when you hit them with a dive light. During the day the water absorbs light, starting with the reds and yellows. During daytime dives the red sponges in the picture above look blah, kind of greyish-brown. Because dive lights or flash units are more nearly full-spectrum and add those colors back and they pop!

There are different things to see at night. We hardly ever see basket starfish (related to the brittle starfish) during the day. If we do notice one, it looks like a grey or brown lump perched on the edge of a sponge. At night they open up like radar antennae to feed. According to the entry in Wikipedia, Basket starfish can live for up to 35 years and weight as much as 11 pounds.

Even fish that we commonly see during the day, like this parrotfish, look and act differently at night. Again, with the full-spectrum light, we get to see it's true colors. And parrotfish sleep at night. The create a protective mucus-like "shell" around themselves. We try not to disturb them because if they wake up and break their "shell," they won't sleep the rest of the night.

The first time I ever heard whales singing underwater was on a night dive. Three of us stopped swimming and for a moment stopped breathing to listen. It was incredible, truly breath-taking.

Can you tell? I really like night dives.

There are more photos from this dive on our Flickr page. Check 'em out.

and more mermaids...

Lovin' it! We introduced another group of mermaids - Rosa, Christina and Victoria and their daughters - to snorkeling at Wishing Well.

We're getting good at this!

and diving with manatee

Manatee have showed up much more frequently this summer and at beaches and areas where we've rarely seen them before. There have been so many manatee at Crashboat that DNR officials have put up signs telling people to leave them alone, to not harass them (because apparently people aren't smart enough to figure that out for themselves), and buoys marking manatee areas in the water to warn boaters and jet-skiers.

It is illegal in PR to touch the manatee but no one has a suggestion of how to deal with an "aggressively affectionate" manatee in the water. This one wanted to play and to have her belly scratched. How to you say "no" to an 800-pound friend? 

Marie and I spent more than an hour playing with this manatee mostly near the surface although she was just as happy to play 20 feet down.

After the storm

We've had drought for most of this year. Water officials are talking about rationing water in some areas of the island.

We finally got a decent rain this afternoon, the first in quite a while. I don't know what it is about the rain that brings out the playfulness in the horses but they do this just about every time it rains. This is just a bit of a much longer too-long-to-post video.

Wishing Well

   

Had the great joy of introducing several new people - our friends Marie and Amanda and new friends John and Darla and their children Ian and Tate - to the incredible beauty that is Wishing Well. This one of our favorite snorkeling sites and we love showing it off!

Snorkeling with mermaids

 So what do you do after a day like yesterday? Go snorkeling with mermaids of course.

Our friend Sharon wanted us take her and her sisters snorkeling someplace they'd never been. Hard to believe Sharon has lived on the island as long as we have - longer actually - and she's not been snorkeling at Wishing Well. Stand-up paddle boarding, yes, but not snorkeling.

It was a jackpot day for their first time at Wishing Well: Three spotted eagle rays, three octopi, a pod of reef squid and about a qazillion other fish.

Not bad. And Elaine and I had a great time swimming with three ladies who are very comfortable and fun in the water.

A great day diving

This is kind of the reverse of the "119' dive" day.

We started yesterday drifting from Natural to Wishing Well. We've been doing this all summer but we really haven't had the current we expected to push us along. Today we caught a good ride. It's about 3/4 mile from Natural to Wishing Well. Without really trying we made it with air to spare.

The reef at Natural has an interesting profile. The reef slopes away from the shore. But it also slopes down from the southern end at Playa India (the beach where we enter) to about 65 feet. As it continues north, it rises again to 20-25 feet. So the deepest point is about a third of the way through the dive and the last third is quite shallow. That means air consumption at the end of the dive is minimal.

Darryl and I were under water for 73 minutes, came out right at the beach at Wishing Well and still had air left.

We decided to do a night dive at Crashboat last night. Again, Crashboat is a very shallow dive; the maximum depth under the piers is about 30 feet or so. (Farther out it gets deeper; this also where we did the 119 foot dive.) The current was neutral so we took it easy swimming around under the piers.

We played with reef squid for a while.

Sixty minutes into the dive we'd used less than half our air. I finally started to get chilly and signaled Darryl to head for shore. On the way in we stopped to play with a couple of starfish. When we got to shore, I checked my dive computer: 78 minutes! And I still had nearly 1200 psi (out of 3000 at the beginning of the dive).

Two dives. A total of 151 minutes underwater. Shallow dives are amazing! A friend asked me if I'm trying to reverse evolution. Sometimes slithering back into the ocean doesn't sound like such a bad idea.

Tuesday adventure

Interesting Tuesday adventure: we started out with some friends for Gilligan's Island off the south coast from Guanica. We've never been there and have heard a lot about it. Some of our friends just love it. It's an adventure we wanted to try.

We got to the ferry dock In Guanica in time for the 10 am boat and were told, yes, we could probably get on the 10:00 o'clock boat but we would likely be the last ones because the island was full! At 10 am! On a Tuesday! Who'da thunk it?

We wound up going to La Parguera, one of our favorite beach towns up the road from Guanica, instead. We rented a little skiff to putter between mangrove islands. It costs a lot more than Gilligan's but it wasn't quite as crowded. Still there were so many boats and so many people the snorkeling was terrible. All the beaches seem more crowded than usual this summer. Ah well! This is why people who live in beach towns don't go to the beach in the summer.

What it's like to dive to 120 feet

Okay - it was really only 119 feet; the photo of my dive computer was taken just before I got to 119'.

The dive was set up as a training dive for a student who needed a deep dive (100' or deeper) for his advanced diver certification and for a woman working toward becoming a dive master. I was just along for the experience. The idea was to simulate a decompression dive, complete with safety/decompression stops, without actually going into decompression mode.

For the uninitiated, here's the thing about diving: it's all about being safe as you can be. As you descend, the pressure forces additional nitrogen into your body tissues. You don't feel it, but it's there. As you come back up, that nitrogen is released. If it is released too quickly, i.e., if you ascend too quickly, the extra nitrogen is released quickly, causing decompression sickness, commonly known as "the bends." So the plan is to ascend slowly, allowing the nitrogen to sort of bleed off. Every dive ends with a "safety stop" for 3 minutes at 15 feet. If you dive deep or stay down for a long time you need to make additional stops, called "decompression stops," on the way up to release nitrogen safely.

If you look at the picture of my computer, here's what the numbers are telling you: at the top, the large "116" is the current depth. The smaller number to the right is the maximum depth reached on this dive. The big "5" in the middle is how long I can stay at this depth without having to make an additional decompression stop. The "6" in the bottom is the running time of the current dive. (The "82" is not relevant to this discussion; it is the water temperature.)

Our objective was the buoy off Crashboat beach. The buoy sits on the bottom at about 125 feet or so. As you can see, after being down for only six minutes and with only five minutes "to deco,"the "bottom time" of deep dives is very short.

In fact I didn't actually make it all the way down to the bottom of the buoy. A minute or so after this picture was taken I reached 119 feet and my computer said, "one minute to deco." To avoid going into "deco" (which was one of the dive objectives) I had to hover at about 119 feet.

So what is it like? I've been to114' before on The Wall off La Parguera. For some reason this dive was scarier, at least at the beginning. Maybe it was decompression briefing before the dive. Maybe it was that there wasn't nearly as much to see as there was on The Wall so I was much more aware of "time to deco." I spent my "bottom time" mostly staring at my computer. Otherwise, it didn't feel much different than other, shallower dives.

The water absorbs light so there is less light at those depths than nearer the surface. Your eyes compensate for the reduced light levels but they can't compensate for the lost colors. The water filters out first the red wave lengths, then orange and yellow until all that's left is greens and blues.Wherever there is to see looks either greenish or brownish depending on it's actual color.



There is another difference on deep dives, one you don't feel but that can be seriously problematic on the way up. As you go deeper, you use more air from your tank. Under pressure, your lungs compress and it takes more air molecules to fill them. So  you suck more air from your tank. At 122 feet you use air five times as fast as at the surface. That means you have less air for those all-important safety stops.

On this dive we all did a good job of managing our air. We did our first safety stop at 65 feet for one minute and another for 10 minutes at 15 feet. We all reached the surface with a generously safe amount of air left in our tanks.

This was not the most fun dive I've ever done but it was a great training dive. And it confirmed that unless there is something really really special to see - like a wall or a wreck - there really isn't much point to diving to 100' or more. 

Wednesday adventure

We live near the beach and we love the ocean so many of our adventures are in and around the water.

But one of the things that attracted us to Puerto Rico in the first place was the great variety of environments on this relatively small (111 mi x 39 mi) island lately we've been trying to explore some of the other environments. Yesterday we headed up into the mountains looking for waterfalls.

At least waterfalls were the excuse. Mostly we just wanted to drive around in the mountains around Las Marias and Maricao. The roads up in the mountains are incredible: narrow, windy, twisty, up and down and around with huge stands of bamboo growing right to the edge of the road.

 

We were looking for one waterfall in particular and we almost found it. When we got to the parking place on the road -

it started to rain (it is a rain forest after all). When we realized we still had a 30-40 minute walk - in the late afternoon rain - we decided to save the waterfall for another day and continued our driving adventure.

We had no idea what an adventure it was about to become.

We decided to go through the town of San German (the second oldest town in Puerto Rico) and head for the coast. We thought we'd drive up the coast and find one of the seafood restaurants in Joyuda.

In San German the road narrowed unexpectedly and I hit a curb. A high curb. Hard. The impact blew out the sidewall of the right front tire. It's drizzling. We're stopped on a small hill right in town. Big sigh! I got out the jack, chocked the wheels as best I could and started jacking the car up. But not chocked quite well enough and the car rolled off the jack. It all sounds like a disaster in progress.

But...

There were two women on the porch of a house across the street. Elaine asked them if they had a block of wood we could use. They said yes and brought us a chunk of 4x4. I chocked the wheels with the 4x4 and started to reposition the jack. One of the women said, "No, no! Espera! (wait!)" Her husband brought out a Craftsman floor jack. He stuck it under the car and with a few short strokes, the car was up! Busted tire off, spare tire on.

While all this was going on, there was a man, not even from San German but from Mayaguez, near the crest of the hill making sure no one coming over the crest hit us. He was also waiting for a tow-truck he called for two women farther down the street who had down almost the same thing I did.

So the spare was on. Lowered the jack and...the spare was flat. Shoulder slump. But not to worry! Another guy came out of another house with a battery-operated compressor. In a few minutes the tire was inflated and we were ready to go find a new tire. Pep Boys is about our only option at that time of the evening. Mike, the man from Mayaguez, told us he was going right by Pep Boys on his way home and we could follow him.

What amazingly wonderful people! What an amazing happy-ending adventure! We never did get our seafood. We decided that was enough adventure and took the easiest most direct route home. But we will go back!

It's my birthday

It has become a tradition that Darryl and I go diving on my birthday. This year Elaine joined us on a fabulous dive.

It's also a tradition in our family to give a gift to someone else on our birthdays. So my gift to Elaine was her first dive with a spotted eagle ray. Watching her watch the ray was my gift.

Happy day, mi amor. And happy birthday to me! By the way, for those who can't help but wonder, I've now made 63 trips around the sun. Awesome!

Ishy's story, part 3 - the money

So with Dr. Kirschner and Cindi Gremling and Hazel's House of Hope on board, and final approval from Nationwide Children's Hospital expected at the end of January, all that was left was to find the funds to pay to get Annelta and Ishy to Columbus. Oh, and that U.S. visa issue.

At the end of November Elaine approached Dr. Jacqueline Bird, her contact from the World Pediatric Project (WPP) in St. Lucia and incidentally Ishy's primary physician, about funding for travel. She in turn suggested she contact Pawasol pour ti Mamai (Children's Umbrella Group*). At almost the same time a member of an informal Monday night get-together group introduced Elaine to Jane DuBoulay, the president of Pawasol. After a flurry of emails, on December 3 Elaine received notice that Pawasol would in fact fund the travel expenses for Annelta and Ishmael.

There are several things that are mind-blowingly amazing about this: Pawasol as an organization that usually funds direct assistance only - be it medical care or assistance after a disaster like a hurricane. Only rarely do they fund support for care like travel. This was one of those rare occasions. Not only did they provide money for travel to the U.S., they also paid for Annelta's travel to Barbados to re-apply for visas. And when the cost of airfare went up, they actually gave more.

And maybe the most amazing thing: All of this came together in 12 days! Elaine was first introduced to Dr. Kirschner by email by Dr. Helen Sharp on Friday, November 22nd. Elaine's sister Amy talked to her son-in-law's sister Kendra on Thanksgiving Day, November 28. Kendra in turn talked to Cindi Gremling, who instantly said "yes" that same day. On Tuesday, December 3, Elaine got the good news from Pawasol. Twelve days.

There were still many incidental expenses that needed to be covered. Unless Ishy's surgery were scheduled for summer, both of them were going to need warm clothes and there needed to be some money for incidentals such as cell phone calls while Annelta and Ishmael were in the U.S. So the Western Michigan University chapter of the National Student Speech-Language Hearing Association (NSSLHA) did a Scoops for Smiles fundraiser at a local, e.g., Kalamazoo, Michigan, ice cream shop. They raised $350 selling ice cream sundaes. Annelta, Elaine and a friend (physiotherapist who worked with Elaine at the CDGC) we call "Other Elaine" went to flea market and sold breakfast wraps and baked goods. The woman who runs the flea market donated her income for the day. Members of Annelta's church raised money. The families at Ishy's pre-school, one of the poorest in St. Lucia, raised money. The Child Development and Guidance Center (CDGC) acted as a fiduciary and held the donated funds until needed. Friends of ours, guests at Ola Lola's who heard Ishy's story when Elaine was home in December gave money to help. Helen Sharp, when she learned Annelta and Ishy were going to have an 18-hour layover in Miami airport, paid for a hotel room for them so they wouldn't have to just hang out in the airport. When something was needed, somehow it was there. 

The two remaining cliff-hangers were the hospital's final approval and the visa. The hospital committee approved Ishy's case on January 31 and soon after scheduled the date: Ishy's surgery would be on April 30. 

With all the ducks - the surgeon, the hospital, Hazel's House, the money - in a row, on March 14 Annelta went to Barbados to face U.S. Immigration. 

For days beforehand Elaine prepped her for that meeting. They went over every document, made sure every "i" was dotted and "t" crossed. Then came the big question. "What are you going to say when they ask why you lied the last time?"

All the color drained from Annelta's face. "You're going to tell them the truth," Elaine said. "You're going to tell them you wanted to so badly to get your son to the U.S. for surgery that yes, you lied to try to get him there."

When Annelta got to Barbados the Immigration people grilled her. They kept her longer than anyone else. They sent different people in to ask her the same question a different way to see if she would trip up. She didn't. She came home to St. Lucia with visas for her and Ishy. They were limited - three  months where six is usual and only one entry and exit. But they had visas and it was enough.

They were going to Columbus, Ohio, and Ishy was finally going to have the surgery.



* Pawasol por ti Mamai, or Children's Umbrella Group, originally started as a new Millenium idea by Jane DuBoulay to bring all the childrens' organizations in St. Lucia together in raising funds instead of each group trying on their own. Several meetings were held with these groups and with an initial donation of $5,000 from Courts as seed money, plans to hold a major telethon were discussed. For various reasons, these efforts never came to fruition and the groups dispersed. Undeterred, Mrs. DuBoulay persisted and in September 2007, Pawasol pour ti Mamai was registered as a Charity to provide assistance to needy children, be they sick, handicapped, in need of medication, basic necessities, or just unable to attend school because of lack of funds.

They raise money by selling at Flea Markets, organizing Tombolas, lunch functions, Quiz nights, sponsored walks and printing and selling a Cookbook, Calendar and Greeting Cards and have, up to the end of 2013, raised and disbursed over EC$450,000 to children requiring heart, kidney and eye surgery, eyecare, special needs programmes, medications, school fees, school books, school uniforms, school transportation, food, diapers and Child Development care. Help in the form of household goods, food and water was given to the Fond St. Jacques and Bexon communities in the aftermath of Hurricane Thomas and extra help was given to two homeless families to provide them with shelter and the necessities of life.

The childrens' needs are made known to Pawasol, not only directly by the people involved, but also by various organizations, such as the St. Lucia Blind Welfare Association, Dunnottar School (special education school), the National Council for Persons with Disabilities, the Child Development and Guidance Centre, the Headmasters and Mistresses of schools, CARE, and many more.

Any help that is given is always gratefully received and appreciated and spent 100% on the children.

Connections - Ishy's story, part 2

With all the obstacles - money, doctors, facilities, travel, visas - many people thought this quest was impossible. Elaine is a bit like the U.S. Marines: "The difficult we do right away. The impossible takes a little longer." "Can't" just isn't in her vocabulary. It's a challenge.

In November, Elaine traveled from St. Lucia to Chicago for the yearly national convention of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA). There she met with Dr. Helen Sharp, a friend and colleague from her days teaching at Western Michigan University. Helen is the president of the Michigan State Cleft Palate Association (she is also now president of the national organization)

 Dr. Helen Sharp with Annelta in Hazel's House of Hope

Elaine described Ishy and Annelta's situation to Helen. Helen called her good friend, Dr. Richard Kirschner, who just happens to be one of the best cleft-palate surgeons in the world, at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. "Yeah, I think we can do that," was his immediate response.
He needed approval from the hospital's international relations committee. No problem, except...it would take some time (January approval at the earliest) and they require that patients have a local (i.e., Columbus, Ohio) host family.

On Thanksgiving Day Elaine (now back in St. Lucia) called her sister in northern Ohio to wish her happy Thanksgiving and oh, by the way, you belong to that huge church - can you ask if anyone has contacts in Columbus that could be a host family. Her sister, Amy, said, "sure we can ask. But we're going to our daughter Shawna's for dinner and her husband's sister (I told you this was about connections) goes to Columbus all the time. Maybe she knows someone."

So at Thanksgiving dinner, Amy told Ishy's story to Kendra (the son-in-law's sister). Kendra said, "I know just the person." Kendra picked up the phone - on Thanksgiving Day - and called Cindi Gremling in Columbus. Cindi immediately said, "Yes! No problem" (That's Cindi's MO, her SOP - "Say yes and we'll figure it out later." She's a whole 'nother story.) It turned out that a four-year-old boy Cindi and her husband Dan adopted the previous year had cleft-palate surgery in the same hospital just a few months before. And, Cindi and Dan run Hazel's House of Hope, an organization that has lived-in houses in very poor, "bad," neighborhoods where the house residents reach out and provide food, shelter, encouragement, guidance, and help to anyone in the neighborhood.

 Cindi Gremling carries Ishy from Hazel's House of Hope

Within two hours of Elaine's call to Amy - did I mention it was Thanksgiving Day - the connections came through with a host family, no cost, and in a house a twelve-block straight shot away from the hospital with a family that had just gone through the same surgery.

Now all they needed was money.

Ishy's story, part 1

We're back home in Puerto Rico after an emotional trip to Ohio. It wasn't a rollercoaster trip this time. The highs just kept getting higher. Many MANY tears were shed - tears of joy, tears of wonder, tears of love, tears of gratitude. The only tears of sadness were the few shed as we said goodbye to Cindi, Annelta Pierre and Ishmael. We shared more hugs of joy, love, gratitude (and yes, a little sadness) as we said adios (for now) to our family in Michigan and Ohio.

But this - us home in Puerto Rico and Annelta and Ishy home in St. Lucia - is the end point of this part of the story. 

This story begins last fall in St. Lucia when Elaine first met Ishmael and his mother Annelta. Ishmael (aka "Ishy") was born three-and-a-half years ago with a cleft lip and alveolar ridge. In the States and most developed countries the surgery to correct this would have been done when Ishy was three or four months old. St. Lucia has no surgeon to perform this surgery, no hospital equipped for it.

 Ishy. Look at the smile in those eyes!

Ishy was actually born on the island of Martinique where Annelta was working as a security guard, making about $2,000 a year. Still, she managed to save nearly $4,000 to get Ishy to the United States where she was told he could get the surgery he needed. In Martinque she was given some very bad advice. She was told she could get the surgery from a particular U.S. doctor, but...she was told that when she went for travel visas to Barbados (the nearest U.S. consulate where anyone in the Caribbean must go if they wish to obtain a U.S. visa) she should tell them she was taking her son on vacation to the U.S. because there was "too much paperwork" involved if she said she was going for surgery for her son.

A single mom. Limited income. Limited savings. Vacation? Can you say, "red flag" to U.S. immigration? Visas denied. And for Annelta, the worst day of her life.

 Annelta (Ishy's mother), Adele (Ishy's one-year-old brother) and Ishy

There is an organization called World Pediatric Project (WPP) that provides surgery and medical help for children in the Caribbean with special medical needs. They help as many children as they can, but the number is limited every year and cases are triaged based on medical need. The problem was because Annelta tried to get help through different channels, she missed her window to apply to the WPP. By the time she could apply again - if WPP accepted Ishy - chances are he would be nearly six years old before the corrective surgery. And, by then he would have been in regular school.

People everywhere can be cruel to those who are different. People are no different in St Lucia. Just because of his looks, Ishy had already become a "marked child." That doesn't even take into consideration his physical difficulties with eating, drinking, speaking.

To all this add one more wrinkle: Annelta needed surgery herself that wiped out virtually all the money she'd saved for Ishy's surgery.

It is somewhere about here that Elaine enters the story as a speech-language pathologist working in the Child Guidance and Development Centre (CGDC) in St. Lucia. She began seeing Ishy as his speech therapist. 

 Ishy eating lunch at his preschool in St Lucia.

Although Ishy made great progress and became much more understandable with his speech, Elaine couldn't help but think there had to be a way to get surgery for Ishy. It is - as surgeries go - relatively common, relatively easy. And as disabilities go, easily fixed. We can make life in our world easier for a child with Down's Syndrome for example, or cerebral palsy, but we can't fix those. But, she reasoned, this could be "fixed," so Ishy would not even have a disability. 

Of course there were a few obstacles to overcome - a surgeon, a hospital, a location, travel, money and those pesky visas. So next up - connections.

Did I say Monday?

Monday? Did I say the first installment of Ishy's story would come Monday? Yeah, Monday. But I have become very much an islander in my perception of time. I said Monday, I just didn't day which Monday.

The truth is this story is proving more difficult to write than I thought it would be. It's really pretty straight forward but it's also an emotional story for me. I keep letting myself get caught up in the emotion and I have to walk away from it. It is coming.

In the meantime a Wednesday Adventure will have to do.

For seven years we've heard about the waterfalls in San Sabastian. For seven years we've been saying we were going to find the waterfalls. Today we finally did.

There are two cascadas or saltos (both are words for "waterfalls" in Spanish) at Gozalandia. These falls are also sometimes known as Cataratas or El Roble or just the San Sabastian waterfalls; I have no idea where the name "Gozaladia" came from.

The lower falls are the most popular - they are closest to the parking area - but the stairway down is pretty steep and at the bottom the stairs give way to rocks for the last few feet. But there are stairs and handrails and the rocky part at the bottom has rope handholds.

The lower falls are a popular playground for families and the somewhat adventurous.

The upper falls are about a 10 minute walk upstream. There are two ways to get there: along the river bank, much of which is actually a series of alternate water courses. Along this route Gozalandia lives up to its reputation of slippery and muddy. The property owners have created new trails a bit off the riverbank that are much easier. These trails are interesting in their own right because of the flora along them.

  

The upper falls are not as popular but are well worth the walk. 

 

The pool is cold and deep, deep enough to be a safe landing area dropping from a rope swing:

Until a couple of years ago to get to the falls you had to park outside a gate and walk across private property. The property owners added a parking lot, restrooms and several other improvements like the trails. It is well worth the $5 parking fee.

After spending nearly three hours playing in the water, we were ready for lunch. The nice caballero at Gozalandia recommended a place on Carra. 111 between San Sebastian and Lares called Manhattan (although not surprisingly  he didn't pronounce it the way we would in English). Ice cold Medallas and great comida crillo - just what we needed!

Gozalandia is now on our list of must-go-to places when anyone visits. Really, it always was - we just didn't know it. We will go back a lot, both to the falls and to Manhattan. Come join us.

Happy Mother's Day

(I wish I could take credit for the beautiful arrangement but actually it's from Amy and Miguel.)

(I do get a little credit for the Mothers' Day morning beach ride. As Kennedy would say "just a little bit.")

So many mothers in our thoughts today - Marti, Anne, Cathy, Kathy, Amy, Amy, Annie, Annie, Shawna - and those are just the ones we're close to!

And showing love and respect to all those women who for their own reasons have chosen to be childless. Good on ya!

Anyway, if you are a mother, if you want to be a mother, if you have a mother -

And if you're not a mother - we hope your Sunday was fabulous!

The trip home

The travel fun didn't end when we got to Akron. Fortunately all the driving during the week - two trips to Columbus and a quick-turn day-and-a-half in Kalamazoo - went very smoothly, without incident.

Then came Wednesday and the departure for home. Up at 3:15 am to get to the airport by a little after 4:00 to catch a 6:00 am flight to Chicago and from there to San Juan. Except our 6:00 am flight on American was canceled. The American people were very good (especially considering it was 5:00 in the morning). They got us on a Delta flight also leaving at 6:00. But instead of a relatively leisurely two hours in Chicago, we now had 40 minutes to get from one terminal to another in Atlanta to catch our new flight to San Juan. We ran through the terminals and just made the tail end of the line already boarding. But we made it. The new flight put us on the ground in San Juan nearly two hours earlier than our original flight. Yay! Off to baggage claim.

As usual there was a cluster of people surrounding the first leg of the baggage carousel. Elaine said, "There's one of our bags." Only by the time the carousel came around, the bag wasn't there. Elaine said, "I think I saw somebody take our bag." We waited a bit, got our other bags but sure enough, our big bag wasn't there. So off to baggage services. Again, the counter agent was very nice. There was a bag similar to ours that hadn't been claimed. Ah ha! Someone grabbed the wrong bag. The agent scanned the tag, got a phone number, and called "Wendy."

"She's out front, waiting for her mother to pick her up," the agent told us. "I'll go find her."

So off he went with Wendy's bag trailing behind. About 10 minutes later he came back, still with Wendy's bag. "She wasn't there." Back on the telephone. "Ah! I know where she is." And so off again with Wendy's bag in tow. Fifteen minutes or so later, he came back, this time with our bag. "She was in the bar by the parking lot."

The luggage thing used up nearly an hour of our "extra" two hours, but it all ended well.

Oh, one more tiny glitch: we couldn't find our car rental reservation and we weren't absolutely positive which company had the reservation. A couple of quick phone calls resolved that and it was smooth sailing home from there.


One - okay, two - more quick digressions in this digression from the real story: for all our local friends who complain about the condition of the roads in Puerto Rico, you should drive in the Upper Midwest at the end of brutally hard winter. Ay dios mio!

Many mainlanders complain about how people drive in PR. For the most part  I'm okay with it. It is a different dialect to the language of driving that statesiders are used to, but that's all it is - a different dialect. However...after driving more than a thousand miles on expressways in Ohio and in Michigan last week among people who know how to drive on expressways, I was frustrated on the Autopista (one of the few true expressways on the island). Because people drive however they want in whatever lane they want - slow in the left, fast in the right - and because they don't move over for over-taking traffic, there is no flow to traffic. It's chunky, clunky. Up to highway speed then brake for a slow vehicle in the left lane. Then speed up then brake. There is just no flow. I figured out that is what's frustrating.

Tomorrow one more digression for Mother's Day then on to Ishy's story.

A few words about travel

 

It's good to be back home, on "our" beach and warm! I spent 55 years in the Midwest; I know a little bit about winter and cold and the seasons. Northern Ohio and southern Michigan were COLD, really cold considering it's the first week of May. I had to break my winter coat out of storage at my sister-in-law's house. I could have managed without it except I gave my heavy sweatshirt to Annelta who is from St Lucia and who was even colder than I was.

 Before I get into the main story - the reason for our trip to the States at this time - I want to say a bit about the actual travel part of the trip.

From the get-go our travel could have been a disaster. We arrived at the San Juan airport without incident. Went to the US Airways kiosk and checked in. Took our tagged checked bag to the bag drop. Then we found out our flight was delayed two-and-a-half hours. Which meant we missed our connection in Charlotte, NC for Akron, OH, since our flight wouldn't leave San Juan until after our connecting flight left Charlotte. As we stood in a long line of fellow travelers, a woman ahead of us in line walked away from the counter announcing, "No more flights. We're all spending the night in San Juan." Not what we wanted to hear. Eighty-one miles from home and already we're stranded for the night.

Ah, but not so. When it was our turn at the counter, the counter agent, who was in the middle of trying to reroute several hundred passengers and had every right to be short-tempered and curt, was gracious and extremely helpful. When we told her about our already-checked bag, she immediately called down to the ramp, had someone find and pull our bag and then retag it with our new flight numbers.

When we got to the departure gate, we realized that on our newly rebooked flight, we weren't sitting together. We weren't even in the same boarding "zone." We decided to get on together anyway. The gate agent was another guy who had every excuse to be cranky since he had just loaded one plane as quickly as possible because another plane - ours - was waiting for the gate to unload and then reload with all the passengers booked for that flight and all the rebooked passengers like us. This agent noticed we were boarding together but with different seat assignments. He asked us, "Would you like to sit together?" Of course we would! So in the midst of all the chaos he worked - and I mean worked  - to find us seats together on a nearly full aircraft.

I'm sorry I didn't get the names of these two people. I would truly like to thank them by name. 

So we got to Charlotte and made our new, much later connecting flight. We landed in Akron-Canton just shy of midnight. Pick up our reserved rental car and "home" to bed.

Ah but not so. Because we were due in much earlier, and our reservation was for much earlier, when we didn't show up on the plane we were supposed to be on, the car hire people had no obligation to wait for us. So they didn't. When we got to the car hire desks, all of them were dark.

So we missed spending the night in San Juan. We avoided spending the night in Charlotte. Now we were going to have to spend the night in the Akron-Canton airport, 25 minutes from our destination,  because the car hire places were closed???? Give me a break!  And someone did.

We saw movement around the last rental desk. Hertz. It wasn't who our reservation was with but at quarter after twelve in the morning, who's going to be picky? We stopped him just as he headed for the exit door. Mike, the Hertz agent, came back, turned on the lights and rented us a car.

At least three different times the trip north could have turned ugly. Because of three people along the way, it didn't.

That was our trip north. Tomorrow - our trip home! Then on to Ismael and Annelta.

Earth Day

We try to make every day an earth-aware, earth friendly day here in our little corner of the world. Today is the official international Earth Day. it's kind of like a birthday - one day set aside to do something we should be doing every day anyway.

That said, anything or day that brings awareness of the plight of Mother Earth and what we're doing to her is a good thing. Because of where we are and the things we do, the ocean is incredibly important to us. So while you're celebrating Earth Day and we hope doing something nice for your Mother, remember that two-thirds of the planet is covered with water. Treat the oceans and the lakes and the rivers with kindness. Treat them like your life depends on them - because it does.

By the way, Elaine is home! That's her with a turtle at Natural this morning.

Did I mention she's home? YA-A-A-A-A-A-A-Y!

Easter Sunday

In my "cathedral," communing with my goddesses and gods my own way, scuba diving at Playa Crashboat.

BTW - Elaine comes home tomorrow!

Home again

Back home in PR.

One of the frustrating things for me in St Lucia was the limitation on photo opportunities. Not that there is a lack of things to photograph. Quite the contrary. Photos, from beautiful scenics to documentaries of local life, are everywhere, begging to be taken. Taking photos, or too many photos, or photos in the "wrong" places definitely marks one as a tourist. For some reason, many of the Lucians are very touchy about photos. When I was in St Lucia in October, I wanted to take pictures in the Castries market. It's really cool and has photo subjects everywhere you turn. Two women jumped up and wagged their fingers at me: "No picture! No picture!"

I really wanted a picture of the check-in counter at the airport. It's over there on the left, under that overhang, just past the white car. It's illegal in St Lucia to take photos at the airport so this is the best I could do without getting arrested.

That tourist image is something Elaine has fought for six months. So keep in line, I had self-imposed limits on photography. The upshot is I have a head full of some of the best photos I've never taken.

So now I'm home again. My beach loves having it's picture taken!

Cramming much goodness into a day

My last day in St Lucia. We crammed as much goodness into it as we possibly could.

We started the day snorkeling at a new (for me at least) part of Rodney Bay. Visibility could have been better but hey, we saw houndfish, balleyhoo, trumpetfish, an octopus. I mean, how bad can it be?

Then cool Piton beers with our friend (another) Elaine while we waited for Other Elaine's husband Tony. The Pitons were cool, not icy cold. But what do you expect? The sign says "Maria's Fish Shack and Cool Beer Bar." (BTW - Maria's is owned by Tony's sister.)

Then off to our favorite beach in St Lucia, Cas en Bas.

 

And lunch Tony and Other Elaine at Cas-En-Bas Beach Bar.

Finally, we were off to celebrate another friend's birthday at a posh resort called Landings. The celebration was low-key but fun, the drinks were good but not spectacular (ours at Ola Lola's are better) but the true star of the evening was the sunset behind Pigeon Island!

Diving St Lucia - again

One of the reasons for this "last" trip to St Lucia was to dive here again. The plan was for Elaine and me to dive together at sites I didn't dive before, including Jalousie.

The "dive together" part of the plan fell apart really before I got here. Elaine fell while rescuing a friend who was falling off the sidewalk in front of a bus. She had to have stitches over her eye. Snorkeling at Jalousie on Wednesday was a test run for diving on Thursday. Snorkeling went okay - not great but okay. But when a cold she'd been fighting flared up, that seemed to be a sign. So I went diving alone.

First, let me say there are some absolutely beautiful dive sites in St Lucia and I understand that visibility can reach 100'. I've had the misfortune of  being there when visibility was sketchy to just plain bad.

This trip we choose a different diver operator, Diver Fair Helen out of Marigot Bay. Honestly, I like Dive Fair Helen better than Scuba Steve, whom I dove with the last time.

Our first dive was a wall in Anse Couchon. The dive boat backed us into a corner of the bay almost to the steep cliff that forms the edge of the bay. We jumped off the boat into about 25' of water. Visibility was okay, not great but okay. We kicked over the narrow shelf that is the floor of the bay and then the bottom fell out. We only dove to about 65'; the dive master told me he's been to 130' on this wall and not seen the bottom.

I love wall dives. I love the initial sense of looking over the edge into the abyss. I love swimming along the wall and then looking up at fish, corals and other divers sillhouetted against the water above. This is a beautiful wall dive. Just wish the viz had been better.

Our second dive was along a shallow reef. Again, amazing in poor visibility so it must be absolutely stunning in good viz.

I'd considered bailing on the dives because Elaine couldn't go but I am so glad I went for a lot of reasons. It was beautiful, despite the visibility. I got to dive, period. And I learned some things about different kinds of diving and about me as a diver.

The biggest thing  I learned is I don't like resort "cattle call" diving, i.e., get as many people on the boat and into the water. When we dive here in PR, it's personal. It's almost always with friends. When we go a boat dive to Desecheo or the Wall, at least half the boat or more is "our" group. Even when we do a discover dive with tourists, it's personal. When I go on a discover dive, it's usually with people I've told about it, someone I've "recruited" if you will.

For example, if we did a dive here in conditions like our second dive, we would concentrate on looking up close for small things. No point in looking too long for the big stuff: even if it's there you probably won't see it. So look up close; find the little treasures. But with 10 or 12 divers that's difficult. One of our dive masters on the second dive found a seahorse. I was actually the first diver in the group to get to it. I only got one not-so-great picture because there were nine other divers zoomingin behind me. Many of them had cameras also. I got out of the way but I'm sure by the time the last diver got there the sand was all churned up and the seahorse was totally freaked out.

In places like St Lucia, where tourists and cruise ship passengers make up the bulk of the divers, the timing of the dives can be dependent on the cruise ship schedules. If there are divers from the ship(s), what time can they be picked up? What time do we have to get out of the water to get them back to the boat on time (cruise ships don't wait!)?

We ran into this on our second dive. Just under 30 minutes into a planned 45 minute dive (and with nearly a third of my air remaining) the dive master signaled our whole group to surface. Sure enough, there was the boat waiting for us. We all clambered aboard and off we went at speed back to the harbor. Good thing too: the cruise passenger divers made it back to their ships with less than 15 minutes to spare.

So what does all this mean? Mostly that I can/will rule out resort locations - Cozamel, Cancun, etc - as dive vacation locations. I'm much more likely to choose a place like Bonaire where the diving is fabulous and is pretty much shore diving at your own speed/convenience. Or maybe just stay here.

Despite all that, I loved the diving and came away with a few great pictures. You can see the best of them on our Flickr page. Hope you like them.

Sunset cruise

The last couple of days have been great fun, splitting time between being tourists and "locals." We went on a sunset catamaran cruise, something I've never done before. Okay, it's touristy but it was fun!

One part of the cruise was a stop at Jalousie, one of the small bays along the Caribbean coast. We'd heard this was a great snorkel/dive site. Elaine got to snorkel there a couple of weeks ago and absolutely loved it. I admit I was a bit jealous of her going to Jalousie so I jumped at the chance to go. It was every bit as good as promised!

Jalousie Bay nestles between the two Pitons, the iconic volcanic plugs on the southwest coast of St Lucia. The Marine Reserve and snorkeling area is right at the base of Petit Piton, the smaller of the two plugs. The peak of Petit Piton is 743 meters (2,452 feet) above the sea. There is a narrow ledge along the edge of the bay then it plunges a hundred feet or more into the bay. Off the headland the plug drops who-knows-how-far into the depths of the Caribbean.

But along that edge there is so much to see!

Like so many of the bays along the coast of St Lucia, Jalousie is most easily reached by boat. Although all the beaches in St Lucia - including Jalousie - are public, a resort called Sugar Beach controls the land-side access to the beach. So not only do you have to navigate the roads to find it, you have to navigate/negotiate with the resort to get to it.

Much better to take the sunset cruise. You get to snorkel Jalousie and then drink rum punch and Piton beer while you watch the sun set and party your way back to Vigie!

Back again

Have I really been away from this blog for a month? Sadly, yes. And I was doing so well posting nearly every day!

The absence is certainly not due to a lack of things to write about. There is so much going on, so much to write about, and so little time time to do it justice.

So, where to start. Even though there is a whole back log of stuff (the whole month of March and the official start of Spring), most of it is old news by now. And for everyone for whom winter still lingers, there is no point in revisiting that.

So where to start? How about the present?

I'm writing this on a beautiful warm sunny morning in St. Lucia. Since we made the decision we are not going to move here, we figured I should come back one more time before Elaine leaves. Yes, the door is always open to return and there are some good reasons to come back. But honestly? We probably won't, at least not soon. Elaine might come back as a consultant at some point, but I probably won't.

We both agree there is a kind of "been there, done that" feeling about it. The island certainly is beautiful and we've met some wonderful people here. St Lucia just doesn't feel like "home." And there are so many other places to explore, other islands, other countries, other worlds. This likely will be my farewell to St Lucia. So we are going to make the most of it!

Happy March!

Today is the 69th day of winter, the 99th day of the flattest surf season in living memory. While those in the north are still getting pounded by winter, we are setting new record highs for the date. It's just weird. Anyway, it's a new day and a new month. That's something to celebrate!