Island Days

Islands and isolation go somewhat hand in hand. Besides the lack of fresh fruit or vegetables (at anything near an affordable price), and unbelievably expensive materials at the lumber yard, things here tend to move slowly. Our truck, for example, has been out of commission with a radiator problem for a whole month now. Which means, that our isolation is almost complete, and our escapes are entirely reliant on the generosity of others. Every morning Steve picks us up, and every afternoon he drives us home. Without him, we would spend two and a half hours a day walking back and forth to work. In other words, he’s a lifesaver. And it only costs him an hour and twenty minutes of driving each day.

The rides are nice, though. The windows down, a breeze off the water, sometimes music (when we can snag a station from another island, or the local one is open for business). The announcements are always vitally important, for instance, the local swim team is serving breakfast to raise money to fly to St. Croix so they can swim against another team. I love hearing those when I’m driving back and forth to the beach too. It reminds you that this island is one small town where everyone knows everything.

 

The downside to that is that it has very little going on, and when something does, you have to take full advantage of it. To be honest, we’re getting frustrated by the lack of pace. I can adjust to a degree, but being stuck at the garden gets old after you watch three movies in a day and read until you have a headache. The beach is on the other side of the island so our weekends consist of hitch-hiking to town to get internet and a short vacation. Mazinga has become my new hang out. Not just because of the pirate flag hanging outside, but also because they have a nice deck with chairs and tables that I can sit at while I work. Marta, my Spanish friend, works next door at the Old Gin House (the classy establishment on the island) and snagged their wifi password for me so now I don’t have to work in the office all the time. When she’s done working, and Leon is free, they come meet me there for a beer and a swim and I get to enjoy the Caribbean as we all envision it.

The garden is a little slow, as I said, but that is giving me time to catch up on movies. I’ve been watching everything in sight and feel quite cultured now. I highly recommend Win Win and the Devil’s Double and Behind the Pines. Excellent films. We’ve also become master falconers. Sort of. Zoe is finished growing, and entirely imprinted on us. She refuses to leave. We’ve let her stay for now, mainly because we were unsure if she was hunting or not, and because we haven’t known what else to do with her. But now that we’ve seen her catch a lizard, and our ear drums are completely shot from her chirping (24-7, no joke), Tuesday is going to be her day of release into the wilds. Just like a groundhog at home, she’s going in the cage, getting driven to the middle of nowhere, and getting left to fend for herself. Tough love on the island.

Work has been relatively successful lately. We fought for some more substantial projects and since then we’ve been working on a couple of surveys. The first, is a fish survey on a little wreck called Miss Kathy. It’s about 20 meters down and home to some really beautiful wildlife. There’s a big French Angelfish that lives there (my favorite kind!), and a massive stingray probably four feet across. I don’t know my fish well enough to be noting them all so I go as the photographer to document everything that is going on. Liv and Steve follow a transect line that I lay, and count and name all of the fish they see along the way.

Besides that, we’ve been working on turtle population surveys. These we do at night, on a big wreck called Chien Tong. It’s probably 200 feet long and home to 20 or 30 turtles. At night, they sleep there, which makes it easier for us to mark them with a big glow in the dark marker/crayon. We put a different symbol (+, o, or triangle) each night, and a number so that we can tell which turtles are returning and which are new. Using those numbers, we can estimate the size of the local population. It took us the first two dives to work out the kinks because it is surprisingly more tricky than you would think. Liv is our marker, I’m the data collector, Andrew is the cameraman, and Steve is the wrangler. Our mistake was trying to do all of the jobs on the first night. We ran out of air pretty quickly and it was too confusing.

Here’s how it works. Liv and I lead the pack. We search around the ship, over it, and eventually in it (pretty neat swimming into all the old cabins) looking for turtles. When we find one, we either identify it as one of the old ones, or determine it is new (harder than you’d think since the marker doesn’t last that well). Either way, I jot down whatever the marking is, Andrew snaps a picture, and we move on. Simple enough, right? Except that some of the turtles aren’t asleep and some don’t like be woken up. Which is where Steve comes in. The first night, when I was marking, I was also doing a lot of catching. Turtles are stronger than you’d think and it took a lot of pinning them down to hold on while Liv took the marker to number them. We switched up the jobs because Steve is a giant and has less trouble snagging them than Liv and I do together. Turtle catching takes a certain finesse; the key is pinning their front flippers back to their sides, if they’re larger, say chest size, hug them hard. The other trick is breathing out a lot. Instead of staying buoyant, it’s best to let our your air and sink onto the deck, otherwise they take you on a wild ride. Turtle wrestling is a bit like the rodeo.