BVI SCUBA diving

I am not sure that I will get a blog entry written tonight, the mind is willing but the typing hands are weak.
We are now anchored in Charlotte Amalie Harbor one more time. I think we just left here! My husband was nice enough to take me in the dinghy on the way down so I could get a dusk dive in while the boat was coming down. I promise to write more tomorrow...It was so nice to get into the water!
The sting ray was quite nice...

Well the rest of the afternoon passed in a warm sunny way. We mostly all (except for Bazza) went for a dive at Great Thatch yesterday afternoon. First time Richard was in the water since breaking his knee!

It was crazy warm in the water there with all kinds of funky thermoclines and hazes of different colors around. Saw a few lobster...

Lots of assorted algae just floating around...

A Southern Sting Ray...

The eyes of a cowfish peaking out...

This was the tiniest little Remora on top of a Nurse Shark. I was not interested in taking pictures of the Shark!!

A spotted drum...

and a trumpet fish....

Nice little school of fish...

Not sure? I call them bluebells!

And a turtle that I scared....

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I was very ambitious yesterday and made a large turkey dinner, it was REALLY good and we all stuffed ourselves. Come to think of it there was just enough for dinner tonight as well!

Bazza woke me up about 1 PM today, as he said if I slept any longer I was never going to sleep tonight. Very unusual for me to sleep that late! I was enjoying it too. He is playing with his ROV and apparently having problems with the thrusters....
Lisa had some kind of funky look going on here this afternoon with tiny little pigtails in her hair, a do rag hooked through her shorts and paper towels! Obviously cleaning!!

This picture is just for Brent. This spring we had a mess of tupperware containers that never fit in the shelf, and we could never find matching lids for. Each time we tried to shove something in that shelf we mentioned that Lisa would get them straightened out (and alphabeticized by plastic type too!! LOL). Well she has been here 5 days and they are straightened out! Believe me, I won't be touching them!!!

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I went for a drift dive this afternoon down the channel on the outside of Little Thatch. You can certainly tell a spot that people neither anchor, dive nor snorkel in, as there are corals that are in very good shape! Some beautiful barrel sponges...

A puffer running away as fast as he could...

A turnicate inside a sponge...

A beautiful display...

a couple rotting fish traps...

Look at these corals/sponges whatever they are! They are gorgeous, in color and in the shape they are in!!

And last but not least, look at these fields of staghorn coral. These are very shallow, and are showing some bleaching on the ends, probably because of the very warm water shallow, but they are sure impressive...





We are now tucked back up in our marina for the night, all on computers!
Until tomorrow, good night!

What a beautiful day in the islands. Hot, sunny and clear. We can see St Croix quite easily.
I received quite a few comments on my little blurb about the sealed bottle that was yellow and smelled like really bad urine...Some mean guests think that perhaps they would not touch ANYTHING bright yellow in the shot game ever again! What makes you think we would do that? Then again, I wish I would have thought of it! It could have been amusing... This is the bottle in question. It DOES look old doesn't it? And believe me, it still smells!

Close up of a bit different shaped bottle then we usually find...

And a real treasure, the large square bottle...

Some pieces of pottery, and quite a few people will recognize this piece, it is the packet company, which the RMS Rhone was part of. You usually find this type of logo ON the wreck of the RHONE!

This is both sides of a bottom of a bowl that has markings on it, so I will look it up and see what it means, SPODE 12 is a china maker now, that started making ware about 1800 or so I believe...



Just a couple more pieces...

This was actually a royal seal from Holland from the first half of the 1800's on some very pretty porcelain.





Lisa diving yesterday afternoon. We finished up in Charlotte Amalie late afternoon and started heading back up the channel, so of course, we jumped in on the way up there....

Not sure how this little fish got in there when I was looking for bottles!

I had a wide angle on too, and this little eel was very tiny in his pipe, so I could not get too close to him!

This is what the large holes look like that have all been dug out from the prop wash off the cruise ships. These are 40 feet down! It is incredible. You go from hole to hole feeling like you are diving on the moon! Believe me, you do NOT want to be here when a cruise ship goes over you!!!!

Lots of very large flame helmets and Triton Shells, I have been consistently surprised how large they have been....

This little Puffer fish was kind of caught off guard by me with nowhere to go but there, and he truly wished that I would go away!

This is an interesting bottle. After we took the picture we put it back. This is an old old mallet, that was it was made. obviously had quite a bit of iron in the materials, as it really is just crumbling to the touch. The glass is horribly thin and just by hitting it lightly with a water spray the glass was peeling right off. The inside was totally stuffed with dirt.

We made it up to Caneel Bay, cooked some steak for dinner, watched a movie and then checked into the BVI this morning. Always a "heart in the throat" moment, as we never know if they are going to like the documents for the work permits or not!
Apparently when they went in to West End there were three people. One was eating, one was on the phone and one was on the computer. They did not want to disturb them, so stood there waiting to catch their eye and apparently were reamed out and yelled at for not saying Good Morning when they walked in the office. More then a little bit as well. They were told "in this country you say good morning" and they told all of them they should know better as they have all lived here. Yes, we do know better, but I understand they were trying not to disturb them, knowing that no matter what they did they would be in trouble for SOMETHING anyways...Usually it is some new thing on the work permit that we never knew we were supposed to have, or should have done differently. That was the only thing they got in trouble for, so one more step done in the work permit process!!

It has been another good day on the boat, well except for spending like a thousand dollars on paint and varnish and tape just to make the boat look prettier!! They only came home with a few LITTLE bags.. Bazza was mentioning that he cannot believe how much the price of things has gone up since he came to the Caribbean. Join the club there!
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A couple more bottles for you. This is a close up of a German Mineral Seltzer bottle, that dates sometime between the mid 1800's to the late 1800's. We have found a couple of these over the years...

This is only the bottom of an very old square bottle, but it is so old the glass is brittle and is just crumbling in our hands.

By the end of the day we suited up and decided to see if Lisa still knew how to work her dive gear! I should have taken pictures of her attempting to get into her wetsuit (she says it is new and stiff!) but I promised not too! However, it was worth a chuckle watching both her and Bazza. I, of course, went in my swim suit and thought they were nuts for putting on all that rubber!!

This sting ray just sat there. He was big and not bothered by us at all. That is an old spike with a bit of wood on his back!

I have seen a few decent sized groupers diving the last few days. They are pretty tame too, it appears...

Three of us in the water, and we stuck together pretty well until the last half and then apparently according to Richie we came up in different oceans practically! I could see the boat in the distance...

Ah, they did come and get me after all!!

We have two neat bottles today. I love the square ones, and this is one is quite large. I was very impressed with it! The smaller one we have found two the same the last few days and it has a seal on it...



I believe it is P. Haviern. very rough seals, someone's private collection!

Bazza brought this up for Richie. It is an old piece of wood off a shipwreck. Can you see all the worm wood in it??? It was FULL of it!


We had an interesting experience with a bottle, probably a two hundred year old bottle that had gone in the water still corked and then coral had grown over it. When we cleaned it out, we realized that it had never been opened. The contents were BRIGHT yellow, like urine. And if you imagine how urine smells and multiply it by about a hundred times, that is what it smells like. Quite horrid. Whatever was in there obviously went really off. I thought Bazza should keep a sample, but he threw it all away!

Richard made dinner tonight and it was spaghetti BLT. Bet you have not heard of that before but it was good! He took onion and garlic, cooked it up with lots of baby tomatoes and fried up a pound of bacon, then mix it all together with pasta along with spinach in it! Thought it might be weird but it was wonderful!

Good night all..

t was nice to be in West End on a Sunday. There were not as many ferry boats to try and capsize us this morning....I am sure they will make up for it tomorrow morning though.
We made a quick tour around the bay, looking to see what boats were up in the harbour, and nothing new... Same old wreck that has been there forever...

Could get closer to it though as there was not so many boats in the way to look at it!

Went over to Jost for a short while and then Bazza said I could go for a dive. I jumped in on the north side of Great Thatch, and the water was fairly murky, but there was quite a bit of fish and bird action.

I saw Barracuda, Turtles, Sting Rays, Permits, Rainbow Runners, and this nice Eagle Ray... There were so many particles in the water I decided to go with NOT cleaning up the noise and instead made him look like he is flying through outer space (perhaps I have too much time on my hands!!)

The Spade Fish are always so friendly when you see them, THEY posed for me quite nicely...

Lots of Basket Stars, that will come out tonight and be gorgeous. I was almost tempted to get in the water tonight, but I sat down for awhile and that thought went away...

Went up shallow and the hard coral here was strange. There was some VERY healthy, and then next to it there would be one that was totally dead, and then the next one would be half and half...Not sure if it was coming or going!






A rainbow Runner looking for dinner...


Bazza was talking to Foxy this afternoon. We have always liked his boat "Ocean Fox" (well, Bazza thinks it would be a great "water workshop" for him with all these toys he is building. The guests may object to tripping over all his half built toys on Promenade). Foxy wants to get someone to take the boat out fishing, as, apparently when he bought it, it then spent a year in drydock having work done. I won't say how much he says it costs, but lets just say you could comfortably buy yourself a BRAND new one of those boats!
He is hoping to get some money back out of it that way. Just in case anyone is looking for a job as a fisherman! He wants to run some deep pots (like 700 feet) and do some tuna fishing.. (but then again, last year when he showed us his boat he wanted to take it up to Anegada and do some longlining with someone up there, so it could sit in Great Harbour for another year or two.....

It was almost three years ago that I first put up a blog entry about the sinking of the Island Seal. It had gone down near Brandywine Bay and there was a few containers floating around for a bit.
This has been in Fish Bay sinking deeper and deeper. Since I looked out my front hatch at it all the time, I kind of kept a photographic journal of the wreck. It was going to be towed out and sunk off the south drop as a fish attraction device, and then we had permission to sink it in WRECK Alley off Cooper Island, which was great news.
One of the things that struck me when looking back at the pictures of when it first sunk was how much it has changed, and you do not notice it in the day to day view. Compare the picture of when it first sank...

and this summer. Quite a difference hey!

WHen it was still in Fish Bay this summer I jumped in the water to take some pictures of it before it was moved....











Then I kind of watched to see when it might get towed away, and soon enough Husky was on the job with lift bags refloating it and pumping it full of air to move...

We were coming around the corner of Beef Island the other day when we saw it in tow...



She slowly (boy that would be a boring job towing boats like this upside down...It took HOURS for them to get across the channel!





And then it subsequently took awhile for them to get the air out of the ship, position it where it was going to be sunk and we watched it slowly slowly start to sink and once it starts to go! Boom!

It was positioned perfectly right beside the Beatta, as we took the opportunity to jump in the water after it went down to see what it looked like. These pictures have a lot of noise in them that I have not bothered to filter out, although I may on a couple as the lift bags hanging off the boat gave me some neat picture perspectives! Since we were in the water maybe half an hour after she went down, the sand was still pretty stirred up...















Lots of air coming out of it still....

The wreck will make a great compliment when you are diving the Beatta. The Seal is right next to it, and it is lying multi level from about 70 feet up to about 30-40, with an amazing wide open swim through at the bottom that I can see attracting lots of inhabitants. There was already a barracuda and a big grey snapper scoping out there new houses!!



I absolutely loved the lift bags on it. It looked surreal, like hot air balloons up around the wreck. Husky was coming back in the morning to retrieve all their lift bags. Surprising to us, there were quite a few that had popped going down, and they were obviously all new bags...

And that is my pictorial of the sinking and making of a brand new wreck dive for us here in the BVI over the last few years! I am sure we are the wreck capital of the Caribbean now.