Did I Just Start Hallucinating?

Living my life down here in the VI, I often think that I have a handle on how things work. Sure, things are a little strange, but I'm used to it. Then I see something like this on a headline:

Governor Calls Bar ID Checks Bad for Business

Excuse me? Carding may be “bad for business” in that it requires someone to actually check peoples IDs, but the social good seems to outweigh the “badness” to the business.

Then I read the article and see that some of our senators (members of the unicameral USVI legistlative body) think that carding people in bars would "place more restrictions on young people." Yeah, good point. That whole driver’s license thing that we all have to do restricts young people from driving. In fact, there are a bunch of laws that mention age in them. Why don’t we free the young and just get rid of all those pesky “restrictive” laws.

Anyway, Kendra emailed me this article, and it kinda blew my mind. Granted, the bill might be poorly written and shouldn’t become law using its current language, but I think it would be great if the senators worried about revising the bill, rather than worrying about harming our youth by restricting access to alcohol to those of the legal age (which I might add, is 18 not 21 in the USVI).

The full text of the article is available here.

Spear Fishing

Kevin and I went spear fishing a few times recently. Unfortunately we didn't manage to actually catch anything. I winged a few fish, but not enough to slow them down (scales flew, and the fish swam away).

Despite our lack of success we did get to have some good snorkeling time. One of the places we went was the south side of Cas Cay (where we take tours for work). Although the entry into the water at area was a bit, ahem, exciting, once we got in the water there were lots of cool fish to see, including a few species of fish that I had never seen before.

This morning we went to Coki Beach, which we thought would be a sure bet as the yellowtail snapper are fed there by tourists. Once we got there it rapidly became apparent that the fish knew what a spear gun was. The only large fish we saw were from a distance as they took off way faster than we could swim.

The photo is of Kevin holding the pole spear in the “ready to fire” position. There is an elastic band at the base of the pole spear which is held between the thumb and index finger of one hand. (In this case, Kevin is holding the elastic in his right hand). To “cock” the pole spear, grasp the pole spear about half way up the shaft while holding the elastic band, which creates much tension on the elastic band. To fire, you simply let go of the pole while holding the elastic band, causing the whole pole spear (in water) to rapidly fire about 5 feet. “Real” spear guns (ie, the ones with triggers and such) start around $250 down here, as opposed to the $50 for the pole spear, so while our pole spear may be less effective, it is definitely less expensive.

Virgin Gorda

Dave, Kevin, and I went to Virgin Gorda, one of the British Virgin Islands, for the weekend of September 16-17. This was the first time Dave and I had taken the ferry to the BVI, as opposed to hopping on a day trip with a charter company. Because it's the low season and we're Caribbean residents, we got a very nice deal on a room at Fischer's Cove which is on the beach. (We opted for the garden view with air conditioning rather than a beachfront room though.) There is only a non-stop ferry between St. Thomas and Virgin Gorda on Thursdays and Sundays (although as Derek and Suzanne discovered last December, sometimes the ferry company might just decide not to go to work on the day you plan to make the trip), so we had to change ferries in Tortola, another BVI. The trip takes about 2.5 hours, with about an hour on Tortola. We spent the time in Tortola buying postage stamps - it's the only place you can buy British stamps (with the Queen on them even) in U.S. currency! The official currency in the BVI is U.S. dollars.

Once on Virgin Gorda, we rented a jeep and went to Virgin Gorda Peak National Park - the island's highest point, at 1359 feet. As our guidebook says, "small signs on the road mark both entrances; sometimes, however the signs are missing" so you have to find it by looking for a "set of stairs that disappears into the trees." The 20 minute hike was warm though mostly through trees so we had some shade. At the top, we had to climb ladders to reach the viewpoint platform. We found a nice breeze there though it was in the sun, it was the coolest part of the hike. We stood there for awhile letting the breeze dry and cool our skin. The air has been a bit hazy lately so unfortunately the view wasn't spectacular, but we could still see a lot of the nearby islands.

After leaving the Peak, we went to the old copper mine ruins, also a national park. The history of it seems to vary depending on what you're reading, but it's probably around 400 years old. Apparently they were a photographer's dream though, as Dave returned two more times during our overnight trip to take photos of them (including waking up early for sunrise photos!).

Finally, we made it to the Baths. I say finally because we were getting hungry and grumpy and the Top of the Baths restaurant seemed to be one of the few that was open on this Saturday afternoon. Kevin enjoyed his first flying fish sandwich while Dave and I tasted their chicken rotis. Then we ventured through the boulders, encountering very few people along the way. We've posted before about the Baths, so I'll just refer any new readers to that post for background information. Dave had brought along the underwater housing for the camera, and he happily took photos of Kevin and me by this one neat bit of coral we found. This may sound easy, but consider that we'd like multiple pictures to choose a good one from, and remember that each time we take a photo, we all have to hold our breaths and swim about five feet down to where the coral was. Good thing Dave can hold his breath a long time! He'd go down first, then when we thought he was ready, we'd try to get right by the coral the right way before the current and our natural buoyance in the salt water moved us too far.

Dave had really wanted to see the Peak, the copper mine, and the Baths. I was mostly interested in the Baths, and Kevin is so easy to please, he was happy to do anything. Because we knew most of the charter trips take tourists to the Baths around lunchtime, we wanted to reach the Baths later in the day. While we have no idea how many people were at the Baths before we got there, I'm guessing that a weekend in September is one of the best times to go. We had the Baths all to ourselves within about 10 minutes of arriving there after lunch. It was really awesome and pretty and we plan on going back again!




We ate dinner and breakfast at the hotel restaurant - which was right on the beach. The hotel was as empty as the Baths had been. We all enjoyed some painkillers - a BVI drink that includes pineapple juice, orange juice, coconut cream, and, of course, Pusser's rum. (Pusser's rum in the BVI is like Cruzan rum in the USVI, or Bicardi in Puerto Rico. It's THE rum.) The painkiller recipes vary, but we like 4 pineapple to 1 of everything else (add more rum if you want). Dave and I have decided they taste much more refreshing than the USVI bushwackers.


The next day we went swimming at a pretty nice beach. There were only four other people there, and there was plenty of space to share. Kevin liked this beach the best because there was so much neat coral. Dave and I had been complaining most of his time here because the water hasn't been super clear, largely in part to the recent hurricanes in the Atlantic - even though they haven't been near us at all. The water at this beach was fairly clear, so we enjoyed it more too. (Of course, Kevin says it looks clear even when Dave and I complain - I guess we've been spoiled!) At this beach, we could walk out in the water probably 20 feet and still be able to stand easily. It was pretty neat how shallow it was.

By the time we finished snorkeling, it was time to head back to the ferry dock. We caught the boat to Tortola - along with some chickens in boxes that were placed right by our feet. In Tortola, we went to Pusser's Pub (webcam here). Kevin ordered some grog to drink and we all enjoyed our lunches after a long morning. We got back to St. Thomas and immediately went to the grocery store to buy some pineapple juice, orange juice, and coconut cream. You can guess what we made when we got home! More pictures from our trip are online here.

Jellyfish

Dave and I have been trying to do some good swims to train for the St Croix Coral Reef 5 mile swim next month. This morning we went to Magen's Bay to swim the usual 1.3 mile swim we do sometimes. There was a big sign at the entrance to the beach warning us "Caution: jellyfish in the water. Exercise extreme caution." Nobody was in the water at all. We put our feet in and it felt so warm, it was amazing. But we decided against swimming and took a walk on the beach instead after we decided to implement the new household rule: If you think it might be really stupid and you might get hurt, don't do it. This was created after my bike fall and a minor accident the other day involving kevin and a butterknife... (don't worry mom, krazy glue seems to work better than stitches). On our walk back from the far end of the beach, the sun had rised enough that we could see there was actually steam rising from the ocean! The air was apparently a lot cooler than the warm water.

Jellyfish apparently show up in the waters here around this time of year. About three weeks ago, Dave and I were swimming at Sapphire Beach to train for the race. There were only a couple of people in the water, but we assumed that was because the water was so choppy. After we got as far away from the beach as we'd planned to swim, Dave asked if I felt any stinging, and I had not. Every so often we do experience small sharp stings while swimming, but they are usually so minor it's hard to tell if we're imagining them. There are microscopic organisms that can sting but we are only sure we encountered them once. It's similar to when we think we're being attacked by mosquitos on our backs - or somewhere that we can't see them.

Back to the swim at Sapphire... Shortly after Dave asked me about the stings, we encountered about a dozen moon jellyfish all at once. We were fairly far from shore and knew nothing about them so it was quite scary. We swam pretty fast back to the beach, dodging more clusters along the way. I felt a bit trapped, like in a horror movie where there is no way to escape. (Dave could hear me scream underwater.) By the time we reached the beach, we'd probably seen about three dozen jellyfish. Dave researched them and apparently the moon jellys are either harmless or don't sting much. I'd still prefer to stay away from them. This morning we weren't quite sure what type of jellyfish the Magen's Bay sign was there to warn us about, so we figured better safe than sorry! Hopefully we'll get some swimming in this weekend.

The pictures of the moon jellyfish in this blog were taken by Dave at Coki Beach when he and Kevin went snorkeling last week. There was a good one of Kevin with a jellyfish but we can't seem to find it right now...

Exotic Fruits

Since Dave posted about our encounter with the roadside ginup man, I thought it was a good time to post about some of the other tropical fruits we've gotten to taste recently. On Kevin's first day on the islands, we stopped at two different roadside stands to get some fruit. I have been wanting to taste a sugar apple for quite some time now, but had never seen them for sale until about ten days ago. As we were driving up the road, we saw a guy standing behind a table with some fruits on it, including a sugar apple! We stopped and ended up buying three sugar apples, some passionfruit, a guava, and a soursop. Later that day we bought some ginups and sea grapes. This pictures shows a big bowl of ginups, some purple sea grapes to the right of the sugar apple. The round green fruit is a soursop and the yellow-green items are passionfruit.


The sugar apples were very, very ripe. When Dave tried to wash one, it fell apart in his hands. It has a bunch of little pieces on the outside of it that make the whole sugar apple look similar to an artichoke. Since ours was so ripe, we basically just pulled it apart and grabbed portions with our fingers to eat. It's mildly sweet and very soft, almost custard-like. There are dark hard seeds in it that we spit out. We liked the fruit a lot. Kevin and I got to eat most of it because Dave was busy taking pictures! In the V.I. you can taste sugar apple flavored snow cones and sugar apple ice cream. As you can see, the inside doesn't look too appealing, but it was tasty!


Ginups are probably the easiest of these fruits to get. They are sold on the side of a few roads and they also grow on lots of trees all over the place, though the sellers usually get to those ginups first. To eat a ginup, you bite gently into the outer green peel/shell. If the ginup is perfectly ripe, the peel will crack open so you can suck the fruit out of the shell. Then you chew/suck the fruit until all that is left is the seed. If the ginup isn't ripe enough, it takes a lot of effort to get all the meat off the seed. If it's too ripe, it'll squirt lots of juice out when you bite into it and it won't crack open very well. I really think this website demonstrates the eating process best. A few more photos are on our shutterfly account.

Dave's Photography

I'm sure that Dave plans to write a blog post soon about what he's been up to lately, but just in case, I thought it was important to celebrate something big that happened today. Dave dropped off his first set of matted photos to be on display and for sale in an art gallery! Dave's photos (mostly underwater shots) will be available for sale at the Scandanavian Gallery in Havensight, right by the cruise ships. Thanks to our wonderful family members who sent supplies for this endeavor from the states (Susan, Derek). Hopefully lots of tourists will buy his photos.



To briefly explain the background, we got a really awesome digital camera in March (early birthday present for Dave) AND underwater housing for it. It's way better than the camera he uses at work to take underwater pictures of the tourists while they encounter fish while snorkeling. Then Dave got scuba certified so he could focus on photography while underwater, rather than how much longer he could hold his breath (which is actually a really long time). (I can't dive as my asthma doc won't sign off on the health form...) We're still putting his website together but once it's ready for the big debut, we'll post a link.



With scuba diving and underwater photography as his main hobby, he's made lots of friends at the local dive shop. When his morning kayak tours don't have enough people to warrant him being a photographer-guide, he sometimes goes diving instead. Not bad to be able to decide it's a good day for diving and just go do it! (Granted this only works when the tourists from whatever cruise ship is in town that day decide they don't want to go kayaking.... But I like to pretend Dave has the freedom to go dive and take photos any day he wants, while I'm stuck at work, behind a desk, in the air-conditioned office, gazing out at the beautiful Caribbean Sea. I've got it rough.)

Ginup Man

We (Dave, Kendra and Kevin) were driving home from Paradise Point when we decided we should get some ginups (small lychee-like fruits) from the side of the road. The following is a transcript of the interaction:

Approaching ginup man:
Kendra: "I don't see him."
Dave: "He is there."
Dave stops the car in the middle of the traffic lane next to the ginup man, as per local custom.
Dave: “Good Afternoon, could we get some ginups?”
Ginup Man: “How much you want? You a big spender?”
Dave: “Five dollars sounds good.”
Ginup Man gets up, puffing on his "cigarette", starts packing ginups into a K-mart bag. Ginup Man finishes, hands over the ginups.
Ginup Man: “Six dollars.”
Dave: “Whaaah?”
Kendra: “What?”
Ginup Man: “Okay, five dollars.”
Dave hands over the $5 bill.
Kendra: “Thanks!”
Kevin: “Thanks!”
Dave: “Thanks man!”
Ginup man (puffing on “cigarette”): “You want some weed?”
Dave (nonchalantly): “Nah, we’re good.”
Dave drives off. Kevin passes around ginups.
Kevin: “What’d he say?”
Dave: “He asked if we wanted some weed.”
Kendra: “Gahharahahahah.” (Choking on ginup).
General laughter. Yet another normal day in the VI.

Love City Triathlon

For Labor Day weekend, Dave and I went to St. John for the Love City Triathlon. Even though my knee wasn't up for doing the whole race myself, I found two guys from work who were willing to join me on a team. One of them, Jeff, was either very brave or not very smart, and he agreed to be the biker - borrowing my bike since he hadn't ridden in about ten years. Good thing he's in excellent shape! Paul agreed to run even though he had a cold all week. Mostly I think I convinced them because one of the perks to signing up for the race is a free night at Maho Bay camps. Because the race starts at 7am and the earliest ferry to St. John can't get racers there by then, Maho Bay gives a free night to competitors from other islands. (During the summer it's only $37 for Caribbean residents anyways.) They are a popular cheap place to stay on St. John as they have a nice location within the property of the National Park just a short 5 minute walk to the beach. Maho Bay camps are an eco-campground with tent-cottages - basically a slab of concrete with "translucent fabric on wood frames and screened windows". The campgrounds also had raised walkways that reminded us of the Ewok's home (the walkways are raised to prevent erosion). They have shared bathrooms and showers and no general lighting at night, so you have to carry your flashlight with you after dark. The hermit crabs were fairly impressive! Neither of us slept very well as the bugs and creatures were a lot louder than we are used to here on St. Thomas.

The pre-race meeting was at Maho Bay camps, and we got to see lots of familiar faces from the swim race in May, and I finally got to put a face to some of the names I'd seen in the newspaper from other races. Dave was convinced to sign up as a rogue participant doing the swim only but without a team. Races are loosely run here and the organizers are always trying to encourage more participants! There were a few other rogue swimmers, including his boss.

The organizers assigned each team a letter - our's was "F". We weren't sure what they were trying to tell us..... The morning of the race, I got an "F+" written on my arm instead of just an "F". And it turned out, the winning team was "Z" solely because they were the 6th team but refused to be "F" so they asked for "Z" instead!

The swim was a tough start for me as there were a lot more people compared to our previous swim races and I lost a little time due to one or two guys swimming diagonally across where I was trying to be. Importantly I didn't get kicked in the face though which is always good. (I like to start right next to Dave as I know I'll have extra room as soon as he sprints ahead.) I swam as hard as I could to the first buoy - we had three buoys we swam in a circle around, twice. But I hadn't swum enough lately to have any idea what pace to aim for. The only really good thing about the swim was that I caught up to this really awesome guy who runs all over the island up and down the hills - super, super fit, tall, lanky, strong-looking guy. He's someone that everyone knows and recognizes since not many people run around these hills that much. I ended up beating him by a little - it was my motivation for the second loop. Of course, swimming isn't his strong suit.....

Dave, on the other hand, was the second person out of the water after the half-mile swim! He said it was a little anticlimatic since he had no teammate to tag and the race was over for him now. He was just a hairlength behind the guy who ended up coming in sixth overall. Next time he should be the swimmer on the team! (We just might do one in 2 weeks on St. Croix with Dave as the swimmer, my brother Kevin as the biker, and me as the runner. Stay tuned!)

My team did fine overall - we were excited to finish as you can see by this picture! Jeff (the biker) finished in one piece (so did my bike), though he fell a few times along the way. He says he passed someone while sliding down the hill holding the bike in his hands! A lot of the bikers fell actually as it rained just before the swim, so the steep hills were slippery. One biker ended up in the hospital with a dislocated shoulder. [Serious bummer for a race on St John as you have to catch a 15 minute ferry back to St Thomas for the trip to the hospital.] They had an ambulance at the bottom of the steepest hill too. Falls were expected...

After we finished the swim, we went to the bike-run transition to watch the rest of the race. There was a post-race party on the beach with free food, and free beer from one of the sponsors (Virgin Islands Pale Ale). More pictures from the race are on our Shutterfly account.