Cane Bay Underwater

Here is a collection of pictures I took in Cane Bay. This coral looks like aliens.
These sea urchins are nasty creatures. The spines are poisonous and can easily break off in your skin. If you get stuck with them you should probably seek medical attention to make sure all the bits are removed. There's a bit of brain coral in the upper right.


 

Sea & Sky, Beach & Bay

This is one of my favorite beach pictures from the trip. This was taken on Sprat Hall Beach right in front of Sunset Grill where we had our lovely sunset dinner one evening.

This shot down into Cane Bay was taken from high up on Scenic Drive. Cane Bay is one of the great dive spots on the island. Just to the left of the shot the bottom drops out into the Cane Bay Wall, one of the most famous of Crucian dives. I wasn't able to dive the wall because the weather and sea conditions weren't very good. We chose to go to the western end of the island instead. This area is covered with sea urchins so you need to be very careful where you go. Those guys are nasty.

Just to the left of the last building you can see the opening of Salt River Bay. This is the only place in the United States (and its Territories) where Columbus' ships landed. There is also an ancient ball court near the landing site. This ball court is related to the ones found in Central America. The far left building (near the center) is Villa Margarita where we stayed. To the right is the Gentle Winds condos/resort. This was a great place to stay. We just loved driving home each night. We would drive past the Salt River Marina with the low lights shining through the trees. The air was thick with humidity and the frogs were croaking/chirping in the forest. It felt like we were in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland.

This is Sandy Point. A beach on the extreme Southwest point of the island. This beach is only open on the weekends and only during certain hours becuase it is a popular place for sea turtles to nest. It is a beautiful spot. The sea may look calm but right at the verge is a rocky ledge so the waves crash in pretty hard at the last second. As you can see all the beaches were really crowded while we were there. :-)

Diving St. Croix

We went out for a dive with a husband and wife team, Derrick and Anne Hill. Their business is called N2 the Blue (www.n2blue.com). They have a boat moored just off the western coast in Frederiksted. They take turns driving the boat and leading the dive. The one who gets to dive has to swim out to the boat and bring it to the dock. Sounds pretty fair to me.
They took us out for two dives. Katie snorkelled on the surface and could watch us the whole time. The first dive was the shallow wrecks. There were four different wrecks that we explored. Very cool. It was a bit murky so there was a mysterious sort of feeling to the dive. The second dive was in much clearer water at The Swirling Reef of Death. That is the official name for the dive site. Apparently, it used to be called Dan's Reef or something like that but a bunch of teenagers didn't like that name so after their dive they said it should be called The Swirling Reef of Death and the name stuck. I'll post some pictures from both these dives later.
We are standing on the Frederiksted Pier looking back toward Fort Frederik. This is just after the dives. The locals are trying to rebuild the pier so that cruise ships can come in. St. Croix just doesn't get the tourists that St. Thomas does. That's part of the reason we chose to go to St. Croix. We had most of it all to ourselves.
This is the Glamour Katie shot I took on the grass outside our Villa.
 

Sunsets

The Fredrikstead side (western end) of the island is a great place to watch the sunsets. This is a collection of pictures we took one evening. All from the same sunset.

Since I took the tripod we just had to have a few staged shots.

 

Beachcombing St. Croix

You may not know this but Katie has a mutant gene that causes her to go stark-raving-mad about finding the discarded calcium deposits of departed sea life. In short, she loves to find shells. This is a typical position for Beachcomber Katie.

And here is a beautiful shot she took of a lot of the small shells she found.
She was also really into collecting sea urchins. When alive, these guys are about the meanest nastiest little things you'd ever mess with. I'll post some underwater pictures of living sea urchins later. Their spines are long, sharp and very poisonous. But once they're dead they have a nice little bumpy shape.

We also came across these lovely conch shells on the beach. They are a little beat up but that's what you get when you don't go out harvesting the poor guys. Harvesting is when they go out into the grassy bottomed areas and find ones with creatures still in them. They remove the creatures, sometimes they eat them and then sell the shells. We felt we didn't want to support the harvesting so we didn't buy any of those. But shells that wash up on the beach are fair game in my book.

I got really fascinated with sea glass. These are fragments of bottles and other bits of glass that have gotten tumbled around so much in the surf that they get this nice rounded opaque look to it. The green bits were the easiest to spot because they stood out so nicely against the brown and white sand.

Iguanas, Iguanas, and more Iguanas

There were a whole lot of iguanas at the Tamarind Reef Hotel and Green Cay (pronounced Key) Marina.


This guy had some nice spikes on his back.

But this one was the biggest of them all. He was sunning himself on the rocks along the inlet to the marina. It's hard to tell from the picture just how big he is. Believe me. He was huge.
 

Animal Life

We enjoyed chasing the animal life around trying to take its picture. These sand crabs really blend into their surroundings.

We found this big hermit crab on the waterfront in Christiansted. It was really hard to get a good picture of him because as soon as I got too close he would retreat into his shell.

This is the best shot that I got of him. We called him Crabby Pete. Look at those beady little eyes.

These lizards were everywhere. This one was on a post at the Sunset Grill on the western coast of the island. We had a fabulous sunset dinner sitting at a table on the beach right here one night. I'll post the pictures later.
 

Carambola Beach Resort

Our first day of snorkeling was off the Carambola Beach Resort on the North coast. This area of the island (Northwest side) is known for having a lot of elkhorn coral. Here is a very nice big one that we saw. There isn't a lot to give you a sense of scale but this was about as tall as I am.

Katie doing a little snorkeling.

Here is a nice little school of Seargent Majors.

These big Fan Coral were everywhere, especially in Cane Bay where we went later. These are really cool because they wave back and forth in the surge.

Buck Island Underwater

I bought an underwater digital camera before going to St Croix. So here are some of the pictures from the Buck Island reef. We also saw some really great stuff that we couldn't take pictures of because they are too fast. This day we saw 5 Hawksbill turtles and a GIANT sting ray. It was down pretty deep (40-50 feet) and it still looked huge. We think it had a wingspan of about 6-7 feet.
A school of Blue Tang

A nice Elkhorn Coral with Katie snorkelling away in the background.
Some pretty corals.