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As you can see, like my MacBook battery, my D’s are all charged up again and ready to go to work! Today started out beautiful and just got better as the day went on. Once again the official sunrise was blocked by the hills of the island and the wind gusted a bit just as the sun emerged bringing with it some warmth…but not too much. The humidity from yesterday has all but disappeared…I guess the low has passed by us leaving more typical weather for this time of year. Everyone slept well last night and we are all anxious for our deep water dive and navigation class. OK, mostly the deep water wreck dive…not so much the navigation class.
Geoff, Wes and I took a run into the beach to use their “facilities” but found them locked. Looks like Cooper has a lock (so to speak) on open air island restrooms. Jenny cooked some oatmeal topped with cut bananas and a touch of nutmeg, Geoff made the coffee and I washed the dishes. I also checked the water level in the last water tank and found it had about 6 inches left…that’s not very much. We are going to attempt to fill three gallon water bottles we have to make do with washing dishes for a couple meals. We will take showers on shore tonight and probably just eek by. It would have been perfect had Sunsail filled the middle small tank (there are two large and one small).
Yes, it’s a very nice day in paradise, so nice in fact that I took a few pictures before we headed in on our water run. It turns out that there is no place to get water so that was a bust.
In terms of depleted desirables we bought some drinking water last night at the bar and should be OK in that department. The remaining milk got all curdly which was discovered when I put it in my coffee today. Pretty much all we have left is enough eggs for breakfast tomorrow. It must be time to go home!
Our scuba ride arrived at a few minutes before 9:30 and prior the kids were all up front reading on the trampoline. Oswaldo brought along another diver who is staying on Jost and a new assistance named Vivian. She just arrived for a one year stay as an apprentice from Boston (previously from Puerto Rico) and was quite helpful.
Our first stop was Salt Island where the wreck of the Rhone is located. The Rhone is a steamship used to carry mail, passengers and other cargo. About 1870 she was anchored off Peter Island when a hurricane started to form. All of the ships in the area headed to protected areas on Tortola but she had some problems getting her anchor up. By the time she did the winds had come up and she was hit by a big wave that caused her steam boiler to explode. This broke her in two pieces, one that fell to the sea floor somewhat intact on the port side, the other broke up into many pieces which now makes up a large debris field. We will be diving 70 feet down to the intact bow piece.
After a briefing on deep dives, seeing from the decompression tables that at this depth we can only stay down 30 minutes without a decompression stop on the way up, we put on our gear and fell over the side. We descended to the bottom together at 70 feet. From there we went a short distance to the wreck. It was a pretty large ship and parts of it are very intact. Many types of fish call this their home and they were very friendly, somwhat impervious to our presence. After we all got our buoyancy set we set about our exploration, following Oswaldo around. As he had described, he took us to an open section of the bow where we could enter the inside of the ship and swim around inside of it. I ended up going in first and, after going down a passage I came face to face with a barracuda the size of ‘Cuda from Cooper Bay. I just stayed still until he lost interest and wandered to another part of “his” ship. The others followed on the tour. I actually circled back and went through part of it again.
We then looked around other parts of the wreck and enjoyed the fish inhabitants. They were very friendly as the pictures will attest when I get them up. Our 30 minutes went fast and we did our ascent, stopping at 15 feet for 8 minutes as a precaution. I was getting light in the buoyancy department so Oswaldo got a weight from the emergency tank that is suspended from the boat for deep dives and put it into a pocket on my Bouyancy Compensator (BC). After getting on the boat Oswaldo reviewed things a bit and then we drove to Dead Man’s Chest Island which is just north of Peter Island…a short “drive” from Salt Island.
This is just across from the beach called Dead Man Bay on Peter Island where Blackbeard the pirate dumped off 15 of his mutinous crew with only a barrel of rum. And, now, so goes the song that ends, “Yo Ho Ho and a barrel of rum!”.
The plan was to go to the floor at 40 feet and then each of us practice some basic maneuvers such as going out 10 kick cycles and back. Going out at a heading and making a rectangle 10 kicks on each side that will bring us back to the starting point. Same with triangle. We all did well. The final maneuver was to…well, we still don’t really know what it was. He made a rectangle shape (at least that’s what I saw), so I thought we were going to make a rectangle shape and end up where we started. Well, we may have done that but to us it ended up looking like a sightseeing tour of the area and lost track of where we were. At one point when we were in open water he looked at each of us as if to say, “get us back to the boat”. We all shrugged our shoulders a bit and he ended up taking us back. Maybe the lesson was, “pay attention to everything around you so you can find your way back”? Truth is, if you don’t have an instructor you pay a lot more attention to where you are and how to get back to your anchor line. I know from my previous dive experience which started when I was about 16.
A wet ride back to the Bight, filling out of paperwork and signing credit card statements (I had negotiated the price down a bit for this advanced course) and Oswaldo was off on an even wetter ride back to JVD. We went for a short swim and got ready to go into the beach for a night at Pirates.
There are no showers on Normal Island so just sat in some lounge chairs on the beach, took some pictures, plugged in our laptops (to find out that there was no internet…it was down and they didn’t know why) and started reading our books. And, getting island drinks, Pirates Punch, Bushwackers, etc. There were three young kids (girl about 5, boy 6 and boy 8?) from the boat moored right next to ours that were from Norway. They were white haired, tan and very independent, bringing up crab traps on the dock, motoring around in their dinghy the rest of the afternoon. We figure out that they had sailed their boat (with their parents of course who were at the other end of the beach) from Norway! Cool. Another family from Norway had a chartered boat anchored (not moored) next to us and we had a near miss with their boat later that night as the wind shifted wildly.
We played a lifesize Jenga game (1 ft 2×4’s stack in alternate directions, 3 on each level…you pull one board out each turn). I lost as they fell on my toe and I bumped my head on a box on the wall. No worse for the wear! Then Geoff and Jenn played a giant Connect 4 game just before we were seated for dinner about 6:30. We had made friends with one of the waitresses, Jesse, the day before but we didn’t get her table. She came over and took our picture and we took a picture of her with the kids. All the people at Pirates were very nice…like family and we were sad to leave them at the end of the night.
A guy showed up on the Pirate boat (they use it to take all the employees back and forth from Tortolla every day and night!) who was the entertainment for the night (sorry, we didn’t get the name). He played backing music recordings and played guitar and sang to it. Sounds lame but he was really, really talented. Geoff and Wes were both mesmerized by it and immediately went over to watch. He did all types of music including an incredible rendition of a Hendrix song. After watching them watch him he came over to them and asked “which one of you plays guitat? I can tell by the look in your eyes that you play”! People started to dance and before you knew it Jenny was dancing sequentially with Wes, Geoff and me. Not so much Geoff but Wes and I were good sports and had a good time of it.
Getting back to dinner we ordered the tuna steak, BBQ ribs, pork and chicken roti and a couple salads. All were very good with the tuna being the weakest performer. Of course, we did a bit of sharing. Overall, highly recommended. After dinner we danced a bit more, picked up our computers and camera gear and went back to the boat on the dinghy, dumped the gear and headed over to Willy T’s (Geoff’s idea). I decided to go with them to say that I’d been there to Arthur and Bea (my dentist who had just been there – previous blog entry). It was as boring as you can get and we just did a drive-by and went back to the boat after driving around a bit. Wes and Geoff climbed up onto the mainsail that is stored in a sailcover and held up by a lazy jack system of lines that connect up the mast. It made a nice bed and, in fact, both of them ended up sleeping up there all night! But not before the three of them decided to go for a hike up the hill. There are some trails that are documented in some maps at the restaurant. These were used by the pirates to hide their treasure and are popular treks with tourists. Usually in the day time. But they did it at night until they ran into some fairly large crabs on the road. Don’t know any more than that since I wasn’t there. All I know is that I went to bed and they were all on the boat when I got up.
After our guitarist stopped playing, the DJ took over again, singing over the songs like last night until it mercifully ended at 10:30. Peace and quiet, the milky way in all it’s glory as the boat swung around 360 degrees in the constantly swirling wind. Fortunately, we had no near misses with the Norway contingent but if we had Geoff and Wes were close at hand sleeping outside on the mainsail!
Marlene Shirley - It never dawned on me how careful one would have to be to be aware of where you were diving so you can find your way back. I think I would be in trouble as I have a difficult time finding where I parked my car in the grocery store parking lot. I don’t really forget, it’s just a matter of not paying attention to where I park. In a parking lot I eventually find my car, but in the ocean…like I said, I would be in “big” trouble. Food sounds wonderful! Can’t imagine sailing from Norway…what an experience!