Here's the second in a series of vacation-picture posts, this one providing pretty much what you would expect of a vacation in the Caribbean: it's all about the beaches, baby:
Well, actually, our trip to the Virgin Islands was really mostly about the snorkeling:
but you don't get a lot of really good pictures from that (not without an underwater camera, which I don't have), and anyway, on St. John you mostly snorkel from the beach...
The beach shown above is Honeymoon Beach, a ten-minute hike from Estate Lindholm, and it's pretty much everything you expect from a Caribbean beach: soft white sand, clear blue water, broiling hot sun. At the far end of the beach shown in that picture are some rocks separating it from the Caneel Bay resort, and on our last day there, Kate and I snorkeled all the way from Honeymoon Beach in to Caneel Bay, which was an excellent time.
That's only one of the many beaches we visited, though. In no particular order, we also visited Salt Pond Bay:
and Francis Bay:
Francis Bay is just past Maho Bay, and the two together can be seen from a nice scenic overlook:
(Francis is to the left, Maho to the right). There's also Trunk Bay, which has a marked underwater trail, and an island that we snorkeled around on our first day of real snorkeling:
The gear that we initially rented that first day sucked, and I wound up with my sinuses full of salt water. No, I'm serious-- when I bent over to pick something up, water ran out of my nose. We got better stuff later, but that was a... memorable experience.
That picture of Trunk Bay was taken from Jumbie Bay, which was a little bit choppy:
Not that that stopped anyone from getting in the water, of course:
That picture was taken from the beach after Kate and I got out, and shows the rest of the family looking at something or another right about where Kate and I saw the shark. Which was long gone by then, but I just thought I'd mention it...
Kate's trip report has more details of the snorkel-related program activities, including helpful links to fish pictures, so I refer the interested reader to her post. And that's about enough post-vacation gloating for one blog post...
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Fantastic stuff. My parents have been itching to get the family on a USVI trip, and I'm starting to think they're right.
We did a bit of snorkeling on our honeymoon last year and it killed me to have no photos of it. Next time I think I'll get something like this:
http://www.amazon.com/Canon-WPDC50-Waterproof-Powershot-Digital/dp/B000…
Nice.
cisko: ouch, I didn't realize those were so expensive. (The one for the camera I just bought, a Canon SD800, is $140. And probably won't be available by the time we take our next snorkeling trip.)
I wonder if I can cope with a non-digital disposable just for the "what _is_ that thing?" pictures, because I really wanted a camera underwater too.
The sad thing? I looked at that price and thought, "Hm, not too bad." To quote Bob Atkins: "Be warned that photography can become a large bottomless pit you shovel money into if you reach this terminal stage."
It's too late for me. Save yourselves!
cisko, that's too funny. Thanks for the warning!
I don't know about Virgin Islands but when we were in Hawaii we bought the one-use-only disposable underwater cameras made by Kodak and Fuji (Kodak-made seem slightly better ones, in a comparison of the two): the cost was about $10 per roll and the results were pretty good.
I'd point you to the shots I took with an underwater disposable in Hawaii, but none of them made it to Flickr, because they weren't very good. Now, this is more the nature of underwater photography - you really can't put tiny a viewfinder up to your eye when wearing a snorkelling mask, the light's never great, and try as you might, those fish just won't sit still and pose, damnit. But like milkshake says, it's a $10 experiment, and probably worth a try, especially for the identifying fish later purpose.
(Ironically, the two pictures on that roll I took out of the water turned out quite well.)