Star Light, Star Bright

Star Light, Star Bright

 Loretta at sunset.  She's an old U.S. Army surplus boat that the East Bay development bought to sink for divers, but they weren't allowed.  So now she's just sitting on the beach.

Amazing day.

It started off as a typical Wednesday – no class, a dive, and our first “school day” where we go to the local school and entertain the kids (I’m going to be helping out in a third grade art class!).  The kids were wild, but adorable – trying to guess our names, finding us shells in the sand, and giving lots of hugs.  As much fun as that was, the day really got started in the afternoon.  For our dive today, we went to a site called the “East Bay Spur”, which doesn’t have any particularly curious characteristics which make it stand out.  By that, I mean it’s not a major wall dive, where you hang out along a wall that drops off to thousands of feet below you, and it does not have any defining landmarks, such as the airplane wreck or “The Arch”.  But today, we had some special visitors, even if they were there only in voice.  That’s right, we could hear the whales on this dive.

 

Here's a picture of "The Arch"

You see, humpback whales pass through the Turks and Caicos on their annual migration.  Even though they don’t spend much time in the shallower reefs that we dive (but they do visit occasionally – just ask the other dive group that got to actually see the whales!), they pass through the deeper water off the reef walls.  And that leads me to the funny thing about sound – it actually travels better in water than in air.  You don’t normally think of this as being the case, because, well, you have a hard time hearing stuff in the water and especially telling where sounds are coming from.  Part of the reason for that is when sound travels from a location and passes near your head, your brain can actually detect the slight lag in time between when each ear hears the sound.  It uses these miniscule differences to determine which direction a sound is coming from.  In water, sound travels so fast that your brain can’t distinguish these differences, and you are not able to tell where a sound is coming from.  Bet you didn’t think you’d get a science lesson today, did ya?

 

Because we didn't actually see any whales, here's a picture of a lionfish we saw instead.  Unfortunately, we see a lot of lionfish.  It's unfortunate because they're an invasive species.

Anyway, to get back on topic, because sound travels so much farther and quicker in water, even though we heard the whales, they were most likely pretty far away from us.  Not that it matters, because their songs are, in a short description that doesn’t do them anything close to justice, hauntingly beautiful – almost eerie and just as melancholy as they are magnificent.  If you somehow are unsure of what whale songs actually sound like, you can look them up online.  If you’re too lazy to do that, think of the Brachiosaurs from Jurassic Park (especially the scene where Grant and the kids are watching them from the treetops)– their calls are part whale song, and we had the same sense of wonder as the characters in that movie when we heard an actual whale call in the wild.  

While the sounds were clearly the highlight of my dive, I also saw my first pair of (spotted) eagle rays in the distance.  I actually feel kind of bad devoting such a smaller proportion of this post to the eagle rays, because they are some of the most majestic creatures in the world.  They’re fairly closely related to sting rays, but instead of being circular and undulating their body to move, they have “wings”.  To move, they flap their wings, to literally, and seemingly effortlessly, fly through the water, and, as much as I hate to use a word twice, they look magnificent when they do. 

 Okay, I cheated.  This picture was actually taken today (the 21st).  Not the 15th when this blog takes place.  And I took it snorkeling, not diving.  Oh well.

So, after the dive, we just hung out until the night.  I was super busy this entire week, with four summer applications, two presentations, and a quiz all due throughout the week (the applications were due Wednesday and Friday, with the schoolwork all on Thursday), so when I got my work done, I wanted to get out.  A few of us decided to have a bonfire on the “East Bay” beach, named after the failed development that is constructed there.  It’s a large hotel that simply never was completed, and we never see people working on it.  Honestly, it’s kind of eerie walking by it, as you don’t often see an abandoned, unfinished hotel that the owners still keep up.  There’s rumors that it’s actually a drug money laundering scheme, as the TCI doesn’t have taxes for developments like it, but I’m not sure if that’s true or not.  Regardless, it’s a nice beach, and because the hotel isn’t operational, it’s always entirely empty except for us

 That's East Bay in the background, obviously during the day.  It's completely vacant, and I've never seen anybody working on it.  I'll probably end up posting better pictures of it later.

We headed over there after we finished our work around 8:30 or so.  The sky was so clear, the moon was absent from the sky, and as we walked out there away from the town’s light pollution, the stars came out.  And they were fantastic.  The stars were the brightest and clearest I have ever seen.  It was one of those nights where even the dimmest stars could be seen if you looked in the seemingly dark spots in the sky, and the Milky Way streaked across the starscape.  We walked the half hour to the fire pit, along the empty beach, beside the abandoned hotel, and under the starlit sky.  After setting up the fire, we sat around, had a few beers ($20 for a 6-pack of Coors Light – hooray island prices!), and relaxed.  When time came to leave, we packed up and headed back along the beach.  On the way home, we looked into the water and saw brilliant flashes of green – like fireflies in the surf.  The glowworms were mating and, in the process, creating little shooting stars in the sea.  After tearing ourselves away from the biological fireworks display, we left the beach and worked our way through the shrubs to get back to the road.  In doing so, the light from our headlamps reflected back at us in the eyes of dozens of spiders along the path.  Every few steps, we could see the shrubs twinkling back at us in the night, just like (are you catching onto a pattern here?) tiny stars in the grass and leaves.  Lots of little things, but they all added up to an absolutely memorable day.

 Just some quick thoughts to end this on:

• I always think it will be a great idea to get a shower right after our last water activity because I'm already wet, and the shower won't feel as bad (we don't get hot water here, unfortunately).  But, every time, without fail, the warm air dries me by the time I can get ready, so it really doesn't matter.
• Burrs here are terrible.  Not because they're small and annoying and get stuck to your clothes so you have to pick them off.  Burrs down here are nasty, and constantly stick directly into your skin.  And they're everywhere.  I often think I wouldn't mind trading burrs for venomous creatures on the island.
•  It still amazes me how much life there is underwater, especially in super-productive areas like seagrass beds and coral reefs.

And that's all.  I'll try to make another post by this weekend, and I'll make sure the picture to words ratio is a little more bearable, as well as post slightly more relevant pictures!