A three-hour tour

We took the Snorkeling Adventure tour to nearby Buck Island this morning. Big waves bounced us around and churned up the bottom pretty bad, and a lot of the coral formations, although dramatic in form, seem pretty bleached and dead. Still, we did see quite a few fish, including this blue tang clan.


  
 As we got off the boat, a lady about to board asked if it was worth the money. Hard to say… As tourists you pretty much have to pay if you want to go out there. But having gone once, we wouldn’t pay to do it again. Box checked!

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Bagging a lionfish

I’m diving with a GoPro Hero 4 on this trip. Not mine, but will be soon. Relatively easy to set up and manage, very easy to use in and out of the water, and better quality video than I could hope for from a comparably priced rig. It’s cool to be able to shoot 60fps for later slo-mo. 

Lionfish remain a scourge down here. Even though I’ve left the bubble sounds on (not interesting), this is still the most exciting video I’ve ever posted here…

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Our dinner companion last night was a pretty cat but had weird eyes like those half-animal people in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Perhaps too many of the shrimp corn dogs… Good to try once, maybe twice, but that’s definitely it. 

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The Angel’s Share

The distillery tour, which debouches (debauches?) into the tasting room and bar, turned out to be the cheapest drinks on the island. Here, our tour guide shows what 12 years of evaporation looks like… the missing volume is called the Angel’s Share.

And then demos her skills behind the counter… Incidentally, the guy on the left was on the dolphin dive with me earlier in the day, so we got to coach each other in how to make people roll their eyes at the story.

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Cruzan Rum Tour

Yesterday we toured the Cruzan rum factory. Molasses, yeast, water, heat, time. Well, that’s how it used to be. Now anti-foaming agent and a preservative also. Well, most of what they sell is flavored, so add sugar and flavoring. They have a “special permit ” to dump the liquid waste into the ocean.

If the rum weren’t so tasty the process would drive me to drink.



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Salt River Bioluminescent Bay

On Wednesday evening, we drove out to the salt River Bay for the night time kayak tours of the bioluminescent bay.

Salt River Marina seems like an especially Margaritaville place, even in the context of a tropical island…

  The tour guide’s patter got pretty uninteresting pretty quickly, and the bioluminescence wasn’t at its best, so the tour itself was only so-so. The pedal-powered Hobie kayaks, however, were pretty neat… Maybe we would rather get one of those than the new canoe we’ve been considering.

After the tour, we followed the recommendation of a bartender from the day before to get tacos at Rowdy Joe’s. However, after a rain forest mountain road with lots of twists and turns, we hit a sign that we were joking about on the way… Seriously?

  

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