Another beautiful morning and anticipation for a relaxing day. We headed off to board our catamaran around 9:30am. So far the field trip staff has been perfect…every excursion has been late. We were scheduled to start at 8:30! Anyway as we were lined up to leave the ship we passed the tender that we rode on yesterday in the 10 foot swells and there is a photo of some of the damage to the fiberglass.
We had about 2 hours cruise on the catamaran, that was so delightful and it felt so nice to just relax and not worry about anything. Today we are tourists. We had a wonderful quote the other day on our daily paper. “The traveler is active: he goes strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive: he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes sightseeing.” Up to today we have been travelers.
After the catamaran we went ashore and boarded a bus all 15 of us had a whole big bus to ourselves. We traveled around the island and headed to a fish farm.
We learned that tilapia is a fresh water fish. We always thought it was salt water. Well, Dr Brown wanted to raise tilapia on an island with no fresh water to spare so he decided to try to raise a strain that is slat water bred. As he said “we killed a lot of fish” before we same up with a way to infuse the salt water into their lives so they could accept it. Today he is successful with the breed of salt water tilapia but not yet commercial. This mild mannered man has had many ambassadors from Japan and other countries come to see what he is doing and even are trying to duplicate his success. He uses ocean water straight from the ocean pumped into his ponds using an old swimming pool pump that he found on the dump and repaired and has had for 7 years. As he says his budget is 0.00 so he has learned to make due. This man is quite remarkable in his devotion to his project and works alone many times unless he can get volunteers from the local college.
After this we headed back to the ship but we went on our own to a local restaurant for a yummy lunch of shark and calamari. We walked around Front Street just to see what was there. You know how every tee shirt shop in USA appears to be run by East Indians or Pakistanis? Guess what? Here too! It was a bit disappointing that the local people were not working the local shops.
Well, after boarding the ship we both fell asleep in our cabin for a short nap, totally unplanned but very welcome.
Tomorrow St Croix. A US Island but for the first time we are told that each person must present themselves and their passport to an immigration official. Just looking at the passports, which suited every other country is not good enough for a US island. This will surely make another day of late field trips. We plan a whole day at the beach so Jack can snorkel.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment