Shark Alley / Dove Cay

Shark Alley / Dove Cay

A panoramic shot from the center at sunset.  Long Cay's the island on the left.

Good news, everyone!  I realized that I can upload videos, and I have taken some pretty cool videos.  The bad news is that I can't upload the quality that I would want to, so it turns out you can't really see them that well.  I might try uploading them to youtube in a higher quality and embedding them into my blog next time, but I'll have to make sure it won't crash the internet before I try it.

Anyway, this is going to be a shorter update.  On Tuesday, we had an "excursion" scheduled in the afternoon, where we could sign up for one of three places that aren't normally accessible.  The choices were the defunct Coast Guard station on the far northern part of the island.  While this can be accessible, it's about an eight mile hike one way.  Another choice was Long Cay, which is the big island you can see in the picture above.  It would be another terrestrial adventure, but because the island is uninhabited, a population of the TCI endemic iguanas lives there.  The final choice we had was a snorkeling trip to "Shark Alley", which is located around the tip of Long Cay.  If you read the title, you may have a guess as to which one I chose.

A picture from Shark Alley.  Can you see something hiding in the top left (that's not a blue tang)?

Before we get to the scheduled excursion, I want to briefly mention our own, unscheduled excursion.  The TCI have caves.  A lot of them.  In fact, they are still trying to locate and explore all the caves in the area.  When we have our field trip to Provodenciales (the touristy island in the TCI) and North and Middle Caicos (less touristy islands in the TCI), we will get to go into some caves.  To mentally prepare us for this, we had a guest speaker talk to us about the caves in the TCI and how he and some others are constantly exploring new ones.  He also mentioned how a lot of them are flooded or connected to the ocean, and he got talking about cave diving.

Two days after his presentation, two of the guys here said they found a cave and heard rushing water - and it was just a few hundred yards away from the center!  Naturally, due to the timing of this discovery, we got excited and headed out to investigate - bringing cameras, snorkel gear, and dive lights.

 

Looks pretty promising so far!

When we got there, it turns out that the water eroded underneath a cliff enough that it collapsed down.

 Here's a view of the water eroding under the cliff.  You could imagine that eventually, the cliff face would collapse down and form a fissure in the rock.

Basically nothing exciting, as there are a bunch of these eroded cliffs in the swim zone, and you don't need to trek through thorns to get there.  Even though it turned out to be nothing, it was still fun to go exploring a little bit.

Looking up from the "cave."

Going back to the trip that this post was named after, we headed out on Tuesday afternoon.  We arrived, and the staff had us buddy up, and then we were on our own, as long as we were back in about forty-five minutes.  My buddy, Matt, and I headed around the point to the deeper water to try to find the alley's namesake.  On the way there, we found incredible schools of fish swimming around the reef.

 Lots of fish and sea fans.

 Although it's tempting to just look at the school of French grunts in the foreground, look past them at all the fish in the background as well.  Amazing that there's enough food to support all these fish!

 Mean looking barracuda with a parrotfish in the foreground.

While attempting to get pictures of each other going under various swim-throughs, we also found eagle rays.  Lots and lots of eagle rays.  Like, so many eagle rays that we glanced over, shrugged, then went back to looking at coral. 

Ok, not that many eagle rays.  It's not that I don't love coral (they're actually some of my favorite sea creatures), but eagle rays are like the marine organism equivalent of a very loud throat clearing in a crowded room.  When you notice one, you stop whatever menial task you were doing and pay attention.

 In case you didn't believe me, if you full size this, you should be able to count eight(!) eagle rays.

 

Here's a video of an eagle ray swimming.  The uploaded quality is kind of lousy, but you can get an idea of how graceful they are when they swim.

Oh, and aside from the eagle rays, we successfully got awesome pictures of us going through the swim-throughs. 

I love this picture, even though the intensity of my gaze is kind of creepy.

And that dark figure I was hinting at in the (much) earlier photo?  It was a 5-6 foot nurse shark. 

 We found the lighting to be better from this angle.  It's an amazing feeling to be so close to a shark in the wild (but we were careful, Mom!).

Aside from pictures, I got some cool videos, but I'm gonna wait to upload any more until I get this quality issue sorted out.  So, to recap - lots of reef fish, tons of eagle rays, and a shark.  All in a single forty-five minute snorkel.  I love this place, although we saw a lot more eagle rays than sharks.  Maybe instead of "Shark Alley" it should be called "Elasmobranchii Alley," but I guess that doesn't have the same ring to it.

After the snorkel, we were taken to Dove Cay, a small island that we can see from the center.  It's tiny, uninhabited, and aside from spectacular views, incredible rock formations with lots of little tide pool creatures, and some osprey nests, there's not much there.  Some of these pictures are going to be blurry in places, and it's because my lens was wet and I didn't think to take my camera out of the underwater housing.  You live and you learn, right?

 

Old osprey nest in the foreground with Long Cay in the distance.

Looking over Dove Cay.  That really is about the entire island.

 View of the "Sphinx" from the top of Dove Cay

In case you hadn't noticed, I love the panorama mode on my camera.  That's looking back towards South Caicos from the top of Dove Cay.

That pretty much sums up the trip.  I'm planning on making a few themed posts coming up (i.e. a post dedicated to the town, one dedicated to just coral, etc.).  But until then, here's some last minute musing on the trip:

• I need to take more pictures when I dive.  I take tons when I snorkel, but hardly any when I dive for some reason.
• Speaking of snorkeling, it's actually a lot of fun.  As much as I love diving, the lighting is so much better snorkeling, and the schools of fish tend to be much larger.  Plus, you can do some free diving, which is a ton of fun.
• At Clemson and Conneaut, I always love to air dry.  It doesn't work as well down here with the salt water and lack of freshwater rinses.
• It's exam week.  Thursday, Friday and Saturday we have midterm exams, which is probably why I spent so much time writing up this post :)