Tut, Tut, It Smells Like Hurricane

Dad knows what I mean. You can smell the hurricane's storms because the air is rank with decaying seaweed. It't not as bad as when Hurricane Charlie came through the Keys, but when you walk from an airconditioned room to the sticky, thick air outside, its like you dove into a pile of washed up algae on the beach. The swells have died down since yesterday, but the visibility is still pretty poor.

Today was fairly leisurely, woke up at noon, sweltering hot, but to homemade cinnamon rolls, so life isn't all that bad :) I puttered around the Center for an hour or so, read the articles for class tomorrow and made plans to snorkel later. I had had enough reading a computer screen for the day, so Mike and I went for a walk around town. We wandered over to the school since I had not been to that part of the island yet. We ran into "Iverson" or Gill, a young high school boy who visited the Center and was learning to play the guitar with Tyler. As we neared the school, the basketball yard had an interesting find....A high jump pit was just laying around! It reminded me of everything I loved about high jump so Mike and I did some jumping for a few minutes before continuing our walk. We passed a few wild horses on our way into the broken gate and found a mural on the back wall (pictures to come!). The mural was painted by a few previous SFS students of an ocean scene. Its cute and educational such as a diver attempting to catch a lionfish (an invasive species) and a boat dropping an anchor into some coral with a little stop sign over it. We wandered back past the high jump pit (of course stopping to mess around some more on the random occurance) and headed back to the Center for some snorkeling at high tide.

Visibility was still a little poor, but we went out anyways, trying to catch some fish with the camera and searching for Sean's prescription mask that got swepped off the dock a few days ago. We snorkeled around for an hour and a half, venturing all the way out to the jetty, the far end of our swimmer area. We found some sea glass, a new sea grass bed we had never seen, some great schooling fish, but most of the pictures were fairly grainy due to the sediment in the water.





Sunken anchor in our swim/snorkel area

 

Bar Jack

Discarded Queen Conch





After dinner of burritos, a small group of us went back to the hotel to escape the dead heat that is lingering around but were met with voracious sand fleas instead of mosquitos and had a hard time relaxing. We managed, and chatted with "Goochie Man" (a local 18 year old who's real name is Generio.....I can see the need for a switch) and "Money" a few local celebrities that frequent our crowd. Headed home past the sketchy house again, this time without any foot casualties, and enjoyed the last part of the evening in the air conditioned computer room. I don't miss Cali anymore :)