Getting Caught Up (Pt. 2)

Although I know you are all so excited to hear about Spring Break 2012 (which also happens to include St. Patrick's Day), I realized that I forget to mention some fun events that transpired before going on our field trip.

 I feel like I owe you an embarrassing photo after taking so long to update the blog.

Well, wow.  Where to start.  I realized that I forgot to update a whole bunch of random little things that have happened around here, yet haven't made it into a previous blog.  I guess I'll start cute to draw you in.  Some of my fellow students here found a feral, abandoned puppy on the island, and brought it back to the center.  After making sure it did not belong to anybody, we sent it to the Potcake Place, which is an adoption agency for the "breed" of dogs on the TCI, called "potcakes".  I put "breed" in quotes, because I'm not terribly convinced that they're an actual breed, and it's just a blanket term given to any TCI dog.  Anyway, the puppy, named "Nugget", was absolutely adorable, and was adopted by the family of a student down here.  Once she was vaccinated and checked-up in Grand Turk, she was sent to the States and now happily (at least, I presume) resides in New York.

This has been dubbed my "Match.com profile picture." 

While we're on the topic of dogs, I used to have a fairly regular workout routine in the morning until I realized that I can work out just as good in the afternoon and still sleep in in the morning (don't worry, I'm going to tie this into dogs).  As I mentioned before, the island has a bunch of semi-feral dogs, which means that some of them have owners and collars, but they run around free on the island.  Some of these dogs have incorporated us into their pack, because we treat them nicely (dogs don't get the same level of respect here that they do in the States) and occasionally feed them.  This means that whenever we leave the center, we usually encounter some friendly dogs that follow us around and bark at the other dogs when we walk by.  But they occasionally get in the way as well, which leads me to this latest story.  In the morning, I was working out, doing some ab work on the mat outside the center.  I left to do some work on the stairs, but when I came back, my mat my occupied by Trousers, one of the friendly dogs.  He looked so comfortable, that I didn't have the heart to shoo him away, so I adjusted my workout routine. 

 Dog takes your exercise mat - #tciproblems

On the topic of workout routines, I started my own ab class at the center, called "Bodies with Scotty," that people actually attend.  I guess I should explain.  At the beginning of the semester, there was a signup sheet for people that could teach fitness classes to students at the center for a fun thing to do.  Nobody signed up, and our student affairs manager, Kate, seemed disappointed.  I came up with the bright idea that, hey, I've attended "Washboard Abs" at Clemson, and Amy taught me well, so I should be able to teach a low-pressure course.  How difficult could it be?  As it turns out, not that difficult, because "Bodies with Scotty" has turned into the surprise hit of the semester.  From humble beginnings of just a few student participants, it has grown to include not just students, but a few staff members as well!  Basically, I have a sheet of rotating ab and core exercises that I rotate through, put on some 80s and classic rock, dress in ridiculous outfits, and yell "up, down" in succession.  The young ladies at the center love it and always ask me when the next "Bodies with Scotty" is going to be, so it's not a bad gig.

I'm really not sure what we were doing here.

Aside from these random happenings, I also had a few marine-related experiences that I forgot to mention earlier.  First of all was our night dive.  This was the first time I had actually been night diving (although I had been night snorkeling previously at the center).  We went to the "Airplane" site, which was the crash site of a cargo airplane in the 70s (there were no casualties).  In case you're interested, here's the accident report: http://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19790912-0

It's amazing the distance that the debris traveled underwater - the nose of the plane is it's own dive site, called the "Warhead."  Anyway, it's a pretty cool wreck and dive site, even though it's pretty degraded (there's nothing left of the cargo hold to penetrate).  Wrecks, even purposefully sunk ones, have an eerie aura surrounding them, and diving at night just adds to this.  We went on a full moon, and even at depth, if we turned off our lights, we could see enough to generally navigate the reef - it was that bright.  I took mostly videos, so those will be added probably after I return to a place with stable internet.  I attempted to take some photos, but the built-in flash tends to just illuminate the suspended particles in the water, rather than your subject.  I did, however, manage to get a few to turn out:

 Fish - I turned the flash off and used illumination from my dive light.

Close-up of coral polyps.  Most hard corals only bring their polyps out at night for protection.  It's amazing how such tiny little creatures can be the basis for one of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet.

Night diving wasn't the only nocturnal activity I forgot to mention in my last update.  We also went "sharking".  One of the professors here studies sharks and turtles (i.e. all the most charismatic, non-mammal marine species), and for his studies, we can help him with tagging.  For sharks, this involves going out when the tides are right and setting up gill nets to try to catch juvenile lemon sharks.  We then bring them back to the boat, tag them, and take a few pictures before letting them go again.  For my sharking expedition, we had to go out at night, and the currents were incredibly strong.  After setting up the net, we planned to check the net every 20 minutes to see if we caught sharks (but we would go earlier if we heard splashing), and if we found one, Aaron (the professor) would go out with an intern and a student to bring it in.  Aaron made the first sweep after about 20 minutes, and within a minute, called the first student to come out and help him.  Within another minute, he yelled to the boat to send everybody, because we had a ton of sharks in the net.  In 20 minutes, we had caught 6 juvenile lemon sharks, when some previous groups had gone hours without a single caught animal.  Needless to say, it kept us busy, and after bringing these first sharks for tagging, we headed back out to take the net out, as we didn't want to re-catch sharks.  Bringing the sharks in is actually fairly labor intensive, as the sharks need water running over their gills to breath.  This meant that we had to "walk" the sharks around the shallows while we waited for our shark to be tagged.  It was a hectic, yet awesome night, and I'm looking forward to going out "sharking" again when the directed research projects get underway next week.

They're really not that big, but still pretty cool!

Shark in the water

Getting our shark anatomy lesson

 The whole group (except Aaron and Scrappy, the intern)

 Kind of blurry (I don't have a tripod, unfortunately), but the moon was bright that night.

We're almost to Spring Break, so if you're still with me, thanks for staying!  The last event involves a defunct Coast Guard facility at the very northern point of the island. 

See the green dot way up on the northern peninsula area?  That's where the Coast Guard facility is located.  It's one of the favorite places to visit on the island due to the scenery, but it's almost impossible to make a day trip there without vehicular assistance. 

If you read the caption, you could probably guess that we were able to secure a ride to this northern part of the island for a day excursion.  This was my first time up there, and it did not disappoint.  

Gorgeous sand bank

We could only spend a few hours there, so we did not get to explore the whole area.  In fact, most of our time was spent trying to snorkel around the point of the island against a monster current, and we ended up in a sheltered, shallow bank area.  There was a sand bar in the middle of the water, and from this bank, the water level dropped rather quickly.  We ended up running along the bank and jumping into the turquoise water below.  We hung out at this area for a while, with excursions to the mangroves to check them out.  Unfortunately, we did not have too much time to spend here, and we had to make our way back to the van so we could be back in time for dinner.  This is an area of the island that I plan to head back to the next chance I get.

 Fallen tree in the middle of the water

 The coastline

 Sandbank we jumped off - the water is actually around 5 ft deep immediately after the edge of the bank!

Oh, and the picture with the hard hats in the beginning?  All the props were trash found on the beach at Coast Guard.  Even though hardly anyone uses the beaches on South Caicos, the beaches are filthy from stuff washing up from the ocean.  The sea is a lot more polluted than most people ever realize, because the beaches that people frequently travel to take the time to clean the area.

Whew, now that I got all the stuff that I forgot to mention in the last "Getting Caught Up" post, it's time to highlight Spring Break.  I know that I was building it up for a while, but really, not much happened.  As I mentioned before, Provo is a high-end destination, and we did not want to spend an arm and a leg while we were there.  Therefore, we tended to not do much aside from eat, drink, hang out on the beach, and mooch off our classmates' parents who came down to visit.  

Anyway, when I left the story from last post, we had just been cut off from SFS and were on our own.  This happened around 3 on Wednesday, and we had to be at the ferry dock by 2:30 on Monday to catch our ferry back to South Caicos.  Fortunately for us, Jimmy's Dive Bar, the (actually pretty cool) bar nearby had Happy Hour from 4-7, which included $3.50 margaritas and other frozen drinks, as well as $3 beers.  Naturally, my first purchase had to be a drink I had never heard of before, which in this case was a "Mayan Maniac."  Anyway, we all hung out there for a while before exploring the surrounding area.  Those with family that visited naturally went and spent time with them.  For our first night, we ate at Danny Buoy's, the only Irish pub in the TCI.  Service was incredibly slow, as was service everywhere on the island, but we got used to it pretty quickly.  That first night, we just hung out around the Grace Bay area, and went to Danny Buoy's and Jimmy's Dive Bar until they closed.  Afterwards, we walked to the beach and took strolls for a while before heading back to the hotel to crash for the night.

I guess now would be a good time to describe our living arrangements.  We had five people staying in a room, but the hotel charged an extra $25 per person per night for any additional people over 2, which would have amounted to $75 a night.  Being cheap college students, we decided against telling them of our additional room usage, expecting to get two beds and a pullout couch, like everyone else who did the same thing did.  This would allow us to sleep two per bed, with the fifth on the pullout couch.  I'm not sure if the hotel knew about our plans and wanted to stick it to us, or if we just got unlucky, but they gave us a room with a king sized bed and a pullout couch, forcing us to sleep three on the couch and two on the couch.  Not exactly ideal living conditions, although for the first few nights, one of our roommates slept with on his friends' couch (they flew down to visit him for it was their Spring Break, too).  And this also meant we only had two keys, which led to some interesting key partitioning.

Anyway, the second day, we just hung out on the beach during the day, but we decided to try to go to the Blue Hills area to check out the tourist destination, Da Conch Shack.  In terms of location, this restaurant and the one next door, Horse-Eyed Jack's, are unrivaled.  They both sit on the beach, and have a laid back, "island", feel to them.  That's about the extent of the positive feedback I have for these places.  When we got there, da staff at Da Conch Shack was pretty rude and condescending.  After thinking that our name was on the list for about forty-five minutes to have them tell us that they switched hosts and our name, in fact, was not on the list and that they could not seat us that night, we went next door to Horse-Eyed Jack's.  Bad decision.  By far the worst place at which I have eaten in my life.  The food took over an hour and a half to come out, despite us being among a handful of tables occupied at the place.  When it did come out, the portions were really tiny, but they put them on these huge plates (they really need to work on presentation), and despite paying around $15, none of them came with any sides.  All of this would be forgivable if the food was actually above the quality of your typical TV dinner, but at least those tend to be hot as they come out of the microwave.  Some people's food had clearly been prepared in the beginning of our hour-and-a-half wait, but hadn't been kept warm since, and the ribs were so overcooked that they couldn't be pulled apart.  My conch salad was more salad than conch, which is especially a bummer considering that it was the size of a typical side dish.

If you're ever in Provo, don't go to Horse-Eyed Jack's.

On a brighter note, as some of you may know, that Saturday was St. Patrick's Day.  We had been seeing signs for a bar crawl on the island all week, with deals at bars across the island for forty-five minutes at a time, with it finally ending fittingly at Danny Buoy's from 9:30-close.  These bars were too far away to walk to and from, so being the crafty college students that we were, we rented a party bus for $10 a person to take us to each location, wait for us, then take us to the next.  It made for an awesome St. Patty's Day.  To make things better, the event was being sponsored by Coors Light, so they had all sorts of giveaways at each location, including necklaces, t-shirts, glasses, and hats.  None of these items were particularly good quality, but given the situation, winning a foam hat seemed like the greatest thing in the world.  We tried to minimize the amount we spent at each bar (especially because their deals weren't great), so we bought some rum and dyed it green for the bus ride.  It ended up being quite a fun night, and we all had a great time (and all made it back safely!).

 Party bus!  Beginning of the night - notice the absence of St. Patty's swag

End of the night at Jimmy's.  Notice the vast accumulation of St. Patty's swag!

With the highlights of break covered in detail, I'm just going to briefly go over some other fun parts of Provo, as this post is getting quite long.

• We got to check out some of the nice hotels, because some students' parents came down to visit.  They fed us, gave us drinks, and sometimes we even got sunglasses!

The view from the balcony was spectacular.  Check it out if you can manage to divert your eyes away from the sexy sleuth in the foreground (with new sunglasses!).

• There was a great little ice cream shop nearby that sold homemade ice cream at reasonable prices (at least for Provo!).  I'm not sure if it actually was so good, or it just felt that way because I hadn't eaten ice cream in so long.
• There was also a little diner that we ate breakfast at a few times (you would have loved it, Mom!).  Once again, I'm not sure if it was that great, or if we just enjoyed the reasonable pricing.
• I naturally had to do some shopping while I was there, and I came away with some trashy, super-touristy t-shirts.  I did, however, partially make up for this by getting a full-sized TCI flag!

Eventually, it was time to head back to South, and this led to the most memorable part of the trip.  There were two options for getting back to South from Provo - a plane for $87 or a ferry for $55.  The ferry was only supposed to take about two hours, and it was over the Caicos Bank, so it was shallow, and therefore relatively smooth, water.  For the experience (and the savings of $30), I decided to take the ferry.  We arrived at the dock on time and waited a half hour for the ferry to show

up.  After the wait, some people told us the ferry had arrived and began taking our bags into a fishing boat.  As it turned out, the "ferry" was a fishing boat, and we fit fourteen students, our bags, four TCI islanders, a toddler, and South Caicos' frozen chicken shipment for the week onto this boat.

The term "ferry" is used pretty lightly in the Turks and Caicos.  And,m yes, that is me on the right, looking mighty hippie-ish.

So, the trip over wasn't terribly uncomfort25 yable, but it wasn't exactly first class either.  The captain made us switch positions about three times to redistribute weight and to avoid being splashed by the
wind-propelled waves.  The Caicos bank is a huge area of shallow water, and some areas are shallower than others, so we occasionally had to slow down to a crawl to safely navigate the bank.  The trip took us over the amount of time that we thought, but we finally saw South Caicos in the distance...

That's High Point development on the island - an unopened condo resort that's been in development for the past 25 years.

...and the captain apologized to us, for we had just run out of gas.  One of his crew members went up to the bow and dropped an anchor while the captain checked to make sure he had cell phone service.  Thankfully, he did, and he made a call for us to get rescued.  We waited about forty-five minutes in the middle of the Caicos bank, listening to the fisher's stories, and playing games until a rescue boat showed up, gave us gas, took half the passengers, and we headed back to South Caicos.  We were rescued just in time, as it's almost impossible to navigate the bank in darkness, and the sun was just setting as we pulled into the dock.

Although it was a little inconvenient, running out of gas allowed us to watch this spectacular sunset over the water.  And it made for an awesome story.  Pretty much, the ferry ride was everything I had hoped it would be.

So we made it back to South Caicos, and we arrived at the center late for dinner but safe and sound.

Whew.  So now that I took the time to write that post getting caught up through Spring break, there's been a few more weeks of stuff that has happened.  The internet hasn't been cooperating recently, making it difficult to blog when it decides to crash without saving, and now allowing me to upload photos.  Anyway, our three classes are done with, and we are now working on our directed research projects, so look forward to hearing about this next post (which hopefully will be out soon!).