Friday, February 02, 2007
Posted at 11:59:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Chairs x 2 (day + night)
Warm & bright -- full moon
"Never Say Goodbye"
waves
Waterlemon Cay map!
Posted at 11:11:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Thursday, February 01, 2007
Posted at 10:00:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
I can't write anything--I'm too tired! Waterlemon Pt. 2 was incredible. Perfect final snorkel. One of the best snorkels ever, creature-wise.
I love that thing that happens when I see something special and I grab Dean to get his attention--a snorkel-muffled "Mmmf! Mmf!," an urgent series of leg squeezes, a tugging on the fin. It's hard to put into words, or to remember afterwards well enough to describe. I want to but I can't. I love it because it's very spontaneous, intense, unrestrained. It's being excited.
More Satyamuna! (At the actual restaurant this time. Outside.) Pakoras = GREAT!!! / Lemonmint iced tea = GREAT!!! (I copied Dean and got one after I tasted his.) / "Liver" eggplant pate = good / Dahl soup = good / Strog. = great!! / Tofu "steak" = good
Posted at 7:23:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Heavy/oniony/garlicky = NOT / Tasty = yes!
Last night was unprecedented.
Posted at 1:55:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Dive Slate -- Waterlemon Pt. 2:
- EVIL fish trying to EAT my brittle pal!
- Christian fish shaped fish
- Cool weird anemone: ruffly, soft and petty, shaggy circle--then reached out grabby clear tentacles after I poked it in the center! [I can't find anything like it in the book, either!]
- It's like being in a big soup! / (a really thick one) / so many fish / all different shapes & sizes & colors / gosh.
- Plaid pipefish, brindled xmas trees
Lost my pencil again!! <--in same area! pencil-eating black hole.
I always lose it right before the best part.
= JELLY-FISH!!! + Basket, pt. 2
I couldn't get enough of watching the jelly swim. I just kept thinking (and saying out loud, I think), "It's so beautiful." It really was. And touching it was amazing. Except for purple trim (which doesn't show up in the photos, but it was purple!), it was completely transparent, and when I stroked it with the palm of my hand, the jelly looked like it was tinted a warm peach. I'm not sure how (I'm not really a jelly variety expert), but I knew it was a moon jelly. I think I recognized it from the Blank Bob.
swimming jelly - swimming jelly - touching jelly - touching jelly - touching jelly!
I only touched the top side of the jelly, not the zappy side. It felt so cool, really smooooth, not slimy at all but very sensuous, clean and glide-y . I loved LOVED petting it, and did it quite a few times. Sometimes I could feel a prickly sensation on my wrist from the tentacles wrapping around a little as the jelly's body changed shape with the movement of the water and my hand.
After I waved goodbye and we floated our separate ways I really really wished I'd felt the bottom too--all the way, not just glancingly. I told Dean to let me know if he saw another jelly. If I'd seen another (or the same one again), I would've touched its oral arms and tentacles full-on with my left hand. Even if it hurt, so what! I figured it was our last snorkel anyway, so even if I got zapped and my hand hurt for a day or two, it wouldn't really matter, and the experience would be worth it. And if it was really dangerous to touch, the accidental tentacle-brushings while I was touching the top would have hurt a lot more than they had.
Later I looked in my book and it says moon jellies are only "mildly toxic; can sting bare sensitive skin and cause slight itchy rash." So it would've been okay. There are jellyfish that would be Very Foolish to touch, but moons aren't one of them. I didn't know, so I was careful. I guess that was smart. :-/
We finished the snorkel by finding my basket star pal's elkhorn coral again (amongst all the other elkhorn corals), and this time I made the most of our final encounter and really got it to interact with me. It was just shallow enough so that I could hang on to a dead section of the coral with my left hand and touch the basket star with my right hand while still (just barely) keeping the top of my snorkel above water and not have to hold my breath and dip under (although I couldn't see what I was doing very well).
I tugged on some of its arms (branches?), until it started to "wake up" and move around, unfurling tendrils and stretching out a little. Its arms were very strong, completely the opposite of a fragile brittle star. I really pulled on them. They were very smooth and plasticky feeling on top (not slimy at all) and slightly rough like like mild velcro underneath. Once it was awake and moving, I kept reaching my fingers into the big tangled mass and wiggling them, feeling it move around me. It wrapped tendrils around my fingers, reaching out slowly, gently, curiously. All its actions were very slow-motion, again the opposite of the frenetic slithers of its its close relative the brittle star. I was never able to see the hidden center disc. I would absolutely love to see the center. It was unfathomably complex.
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Satyamuna (the new vegetarian place) is good! (The food kind of reminds me of Caffe Coco.) Dean picked up takeout from there for supper while I de-slimed after my Casey-ing. Fantastic. (Casey said Denis is one of his favorite beaches.) We got dahl soup, cauliflower soup, spinach pie, nested tofu ("tofu nest"), and tofu stroganoff, and they were all good. The strog. was my fav--the tofu tasted like noodles!
Posted at 9:17:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Dean talked to the owner and he told him all about how he and his wife came here on their honeymoon in June and decided to move from New York and start a restaurant because all the restaurants on St. John had vegetarian medleys.
Before Casey, we came back from Denis and went on the banana and both trampolines (medium and big) (trampoline is such a great word). It was FUN!!! I kept trying to knock Dean off on the banana but nothing worked. My plaintive wail: "I'm too little to do anything!!" I kept giggling constantly on the trampolines. It was like being tickled.
Oh and we did go to Nest! Dean waited outside and read a magazine while I looked at everything, and I was in Heaven. If I had a store, it would look like Nest. I ended up only buying one item (it was the only item I really wanted to own), and it was the first thing that caught my eye the minute I walked in. A book.
Dean wanted to know why I was "staring out into the sea." So I told him: "Because the waves look happy." I was watching them run along toward shore, and the edges were so joyful and eager as they curled over the rocky flats, bouncing, jumping, playing.
Posted at 2:00:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Okay! Denis is not closed! And the Deli Feast was highly good, although my brie was missed. I got a wrap (it was green) w/ham, swiss, tomato, sprouts & dijon mustard. It would've been twice as good with brie, but the goodness level was still very high. Dean got a so-called veggie burger. It looked like a big messy Mexican thing. He liked it! (Not surprisingly.)
Posted at 12:30:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
The Simple Feast is closed 'til August!!! :-( We had to get a Deli Grotto feast instead. No brie. :-( AND, Nest was randomly closed (just 'til 12:00, the sign says) so we couldn't go there either and the Best Wednesday Plan Ever is foiled. Denis better not be closed!
Posted at 11:25:00 AM by Laura W. Petix.
My hair feels the opposite of before: super ultra insanely soft vs. stiff & starchy w/salt. Both ways are good.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
We went on the wrong spur trail on the way to The Nude, but realized it before too long and turned around. Dean ruined 20 Questions by answering "Yes" to my "Is it a fish?" query when the item was the octopus I poked two years ago. Octopus are not fish! Groan. My hydroid injury is all better today. (Good!)
Posted at 12:30:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
It's pretty at The Nude. White sand, ocean rippling through shades of turquoise, aqua and azure blue. There are no nudes here this time, though. (Slackers!)
Shallow slither / Anemones / Sticky! / COOL / Lots of them!
I can't resist cnidarians.
Loved everything so close and so clear, and all the shallow shallow skinny spots where it was just me because no one else would be crazy enough to go there. Great, totally fun snorkel. We didn't bring wetsuits, though, and I was shivering and had to get out early. (Pretty much the only thing I wrote on my slate was "BURRR!!")
On the way back to shore, however, I found a cool sputnik urchin just sitting on the sandy bottom, and then, as Dean was swimming away and I lagged behind despite my chattering teeth, I saw the STARFISH. Also just lying there out in the open! Summoned Dean back like MAD. Such unbelievable starfish luck recently! Just lying there: STAR. A new kind, a totally unfamiliar and cool kind. A kind of which I am now a FAN. Pointy-footed star, with beautiful translucent orange tube feet. And so spiny, if you look closely; it's the most echinodermy star I have ever met. We were so close to shore that I was able to bring it out of the water and photograph it after I warmed up.
While I was looking at it on the beach, taking pictures of both sides, this Mexican guy (he told me he was from Mexico, and all about himself, including the restaurant in town that he works at, and the time he freaked out while snorkeling after drinking and "smoking") came up to me in amazement, and I told him a little about the star, showing him the feet, telling him how it was okay for it to be out of the water for a little while, but then we'd put it back.... He asked me if my boyfriend found it, and I said I did. (I didn't correct him about the "boyfriend" part.) He said he'd been swimming at Salomon for 10 years and had never seen a starfish. It's my echinoderm blood.
Dean keeps crowing about how premium his green tea smoothie is. He says it's the best one ever. Better than SBUX. My iced coffee is really good, too. Best thing to get at Deli G, I think. They also have orange-orange and VIPA. Deli Grotto is great. For future reference, natch.
Posted at 11:30:00 AM by Laura W. Petix.
Monday, January 29, 2007
Hm. I forgot that my back was murdered in the previous entry. It feels a lot better now. We snorkeled for about 1 hour and 40 minutes, on both sides of the bay plus the rocks in the middle. It was kind of a boring snorkel compared to the usual Best Snorkel Ever at the Salt, but it was still nice.
Posted at 10:00:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Saw an insane number of flaming-o tongues, almost all of them on purple sea fans. I also found a green brittle star who was regenerating two legs, and the new growth part was really skinny (and pink)! It was very weird and cool. My new replacement pencil was good! (Mechanical, lime green w/clip! Found for me by Dean at Dolphin Market.)
Both Dean and I got injuries today! Dean stepped on an uni! (!!) Just a little bit. And tiny spine fragments broke off in the side of his foot. They don't hurt. (I just extracted one with a tweezers. It's pointy!)
My injury hurts! I got it right before we started snorkeling (so, about 2 o'clock-ish) and it still hurts now. A lot. It feels like a burn (where the burning feeling doesn't go away) or a slap-style stinging sensation. It's not mild, either. It's very noticeable. Before we actually geared up, I was wading around in the shallow water to cool off, and I noticed some cool-looking blue stuff that I wanted to look at more closely, so I put on my mask and sort of crouched down with my eyes under the water so I could see it clearly. When I got back to shore my thigh felt stingy and I had no idea why. I looked at it to see if it looked weird, but it didn't.
We put on our wetsuits and the rest of our gear and went in (meanwhile my leg felt more and more burny, like I'd accidentally ironed it), and I told Dean I wanted to look around to see if I could figure out what I could have unknowingly brushed against. Whatever it was, I hadn't even felt that I'd touched anything at the time. Surprisingly enough, I was able to find the exact same blue stuff again and recognised the spot as being the same one I'd been in before, so I looked around and spotted these tiny little things growing on a rock. They were white and about an inch or so tall, and looked sort of like mini pine trees or feathers. Very inconspicuous and innocuous. Dean pointed out a nearby brain coral and said maybe I'd scraped against it, but I knew I hadn't and I knew those little guys were the culprit. It's bad to touch coral, but in most cases it's because it hurts the coral, not because it's dangerous (there are a few types of stinging coral, but I was pretty sure brains aren't one of them).
The whole time we snorkeled, I could feel my leg burning against my wetsuit. I was highly aware of it. It wasn't super-painful like to a cringeworthy degree or anything, but it definitely wasn't pleasant. Sort of like bad sunburn that you can't ignore. After we got out I looked at my leg again and there were welts.
When we got back to the car, I looked in my handy-dandy creature book and immediately ID'ed the little guys as hydroids, a type of cnidarian (other cnidarians include jellyfish, anemones, and corals). To be exact, they were Feather Hydroids (p.69) with fuzzy little Hydroid Zoanthids (p.107) living on them. The book describes Feather Hydroids as "Toxic; sting bare skin" and says, "In the event of a sting, never rub the affected area or wash with fresh water.... Both actions can cause additional nematocysts to discharge." Rubbing and washing is basically exactly what I did by putting on my wetsuit and swimming around for an hour and a half. According to the book, the proper course of action is... VINEGAR!! Of course. (Vinegar will immobilize unspent nematocysts. But all mine were discharged like crazy by then.)
We didn't have any vinegar, but after a tingly/stingy/burny (but fantastic, natch) dinner at Tage, Dean tried applying Ting instead (ha!), and it actually semi-helped for a little while.
Hydroids are very cool, but very evil.
We tried the Book & Bean place near Starfish Market. It smells really good, like an Indian grocery store. They had some cool books, such as Cod (by the author of Salt) and an entire book on the trees of the east end of St. John. (They also had a book of the specific great trees of the Virgin Islands as a whole. There's a boabab tree on St. John!). The cappuccino wasn't my fav, though (it was okay), and it was a dollar more than Starbucks!
Posted at 1:15:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
It's very hot & sunny here this week. We're at the Salt right now. I'm tired, and every inch of my back hurts.
Sunday, January 28, 2007
I can't believe this. I told Dean the Rhumb Lines girl was going to do a Bob cover, and she's singing, "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere." (!!!) eXcellent choice.
Posted at 7:10:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
[Edit: She also sang "All I Have To Do Is Dream," right before we left. Not to be confused with "All You Have To Do Is Dream." I probably would have fainted if she'd covered that.]
Waterlemon Cay snorkel notes, from my super-great new arm-mounted dive slate and Moleskine drawing book:
Posted at 2:30:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
...big mauve-ish sea cuke, three crabs/shrimp under a ledge (blue, orange and clear, with big long antennas) with squig anemone... washed up in surges around cay, but swam free... feels so natural having my slate for notes; now I can't imagine being without it...
and then...
I found a BASKET STAR! Really! Most incredible find ever. It was orange, too. And everything that I'd imagine in a basket star if I'd made it up. It's like something that would happen to me in dream. Amazing. Too intricate to take in. Endless tangle of branches, curled, twining. Looked / And looked (dove down over & over, just to stare). It was on an elk coral, not even deep, blending in, hiding in the center between the antlers. How did I find it?
I touched legs, unfurled tendrils a little (barehanded). They felt a little sticky (like very fine velcro), but not grabby.
I wouldn't have even said, "I'm going to find a basket star" as a joke. (Well, maybe as a joke.) Not while snorkeling at Waterlemon Cay, shallow enough to touch, in the bright sunlight of day. I would've thought it less likely than finding a mangosteen stand while walking down the street in New York City.
I also found a tiny octopus in a hole in a rock. With an eye that looked out.
Waterlemon! I'm wearing my new FOAM shoes from Kauai (and Dean's wearing his Crocs! He sure has a lot of faith in his Crocs!) and I like them. I got a bagel at the Deli Grotto since there's no salt and I'm off my oats. (I checked the cupboard for my leftover salt from last year, but someone ate it. Or threw it away. Our hidden mats and dive weights were gone too, but we bought four pounds for me at the St. Thomas dive shop near the ferry, so we have a little weight, at least.) [Edit, 2/5: Our Note To Future Selves was still in its spot, though! We put it back unchanged when we left on Saturday since there wasn't much to update and I was a slack. I have the same info on Zi anyway, so it's mostly just a formality.] Deli Grotto's bagels are superb. Even Dean said, "It's good!" but I can't get a signed statement.
Posted at 1:10:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
We nosed around the whole Mongoose Junction looking for mats, but there were none to be had, not even for ready money. I think the Westin bought all the mats on the entire island so they can have a monopoly, because we saw some (for rent only) at the tennis/car place. (Typical St. John situation!) Anyway, even though we found zero mats, we found a Queen Trigger ornament (that matches my two other cloisonné humu ornaments) and I actually bought it! I picked out the best instance, of course, even though the store guy saw me comparing them all and said, "They're all the same." False. Mine has a tons brighter eye.
I like Virgin Islands Pale Ale (from St. John!). It tastes like Bass & C. with a subtle fruity element (which also smells good). Mango. Nest is NOT out of business!! We saw it last night when we attempted to go to the new vegetarian restaurant above Starfish Market. The veg place was closed (so was Nest, but it was evening, so that was to be expected). It's only open for dinner on Wed., Thur, & Fri. Lucky for us, Happy Fish was open so we just went there instead. It was great! And, I got revived enough for a Starfish Market and Dolphin Market double-header. Dolphin mart has much cheaper Cruzan Rum ($8.45 vs. $9.99) and Grand ($25.75 vs. $28.99). (Both are insanely cheap compared to home.) They also have goat meat. But NO sea salt.
Posted at 10:51:00 AM by Laura W. Petix.
Saturday, January 27, 2007
We have a girl Riley! She seems nice. My secret snoozing weapon finally failed me, and I only got about 1/2 a wink. I was dreaming "The Gambler" one second before my alarm rang at 3:15. Yes, the Kenny Rogers song. "And when he'd finished speaking, he turned back toward the window / Crushed out his cigarette, and faded off the sleep." That part exactly. Maybe I only slept for about 10 seconds.
Posted at 4:28:00 AM by Laura W. Petix.
My Rough & Scratchy is also Feathery this year. We took it out on the balcony and shook it off like mad, but there are still some left. It looked exactly like it does in the spring when it's snowing that fluffy kind of pollen. And, some joined the nest known as my hair.
