February with friends.....

Yes...back on Vieques again. This time with good friends from Indiana. Seems there is always some snafu with getting to Vieques, at least when your departure point is in the midwest. This trip so far has proven true to form. I've distilled down the short list:

* American airlines insisting they have no baggage agreement with Cape Air
* Cape Air losing our luggage for almost 24 hours
* My drivers license being expired, meaning that Lorrie had to email a picture of her drivers license to me via smart phone so we could get our jeep.

After all that, which took nearly a full day...our semi annual Vieques trip begins and quite honestly...with all the frustrations...and yes I was extremely frustrated....Vieques sedative quality has lulled me into island time and life is once again good.....well...probably better than good...great.

These first few days have been jam packed, akin to a Vieques style force feeding for Brad and Becky.  We've been to La Plata, of course, went sailing with Little Boat, and listened to Robert give a wonderful night time talk about the winter constellations and how different cultures have interpreted the night sky. The evening ended with the lighting of Chinese in celebration of the Chinese new year.

First thing for the day was a sail with Little Boat out to Lemon reef and then to the mangroves.







I had forgotten just how relaxing and beautiful a sail with Jorge was. We left @ 8:30am for our sail.



Jorge sailed out to lemon reef and moored. We all geared up and he lead us around and through the reef. It wasn't long before he spotted this huge nurse shark sleeping on the ocean floor. We all got a very close up look at it. Jorge dove down for a closer look:



Here's a picture of the shark by itself. I would estimate it was 6 foot, tip to tail.




The blue tang schools were everywhere and we swam right through them.

Jorge showed us what he estimated to be a 70 year old brain coral. For what he said they grow 1cm per year.  He also told us about a worm that lives inside the brain coral but has it's tail sticking out. If you touch the tail it retracts back inside the coral. After watching Jorge do it I gave it a go myself....really kewl.



The reef was as beautiful as ever. So many different fish. We saw barracuda, spotted eagle rays, live elk horn coral as well as stag horn coral.





What a great time.  After we left the reef we sailed over into a mangrove channel. Jorge told us it was a red mangrove that was growing in the area. He found a live starfish for us and explained how the mouth of the starfish is on the bottom.



and the "butt" is on the top of the starfish.



The particular starfish he found for us was called a "cushion" starfish.

So that was the first half of our day. There's a lot more for me to write about, but for now I"m packing up and heading to the beach. This has been a great start.

:-)