Smooth Riding

Things are moving even faster than before here in Arrecife, due primarily to my recent acquisition of a new bicycle. My morning commute has been cut from a 25 minute walk to a 15 minute bike ride, and the best part is the built-in air conditioning! Granted, the weather hasn't been as warm as one typically envisions for the Caribbean, but I guarantee it's better than what the US is managing to scrape together these days. Our weather is pretty consistently in the mid 80s during the day to the mid 70s at night, plus wind and humidity.

Today was a day off for me, so I went into town and got myself an Arrecife driver's license. It helps to have a local ID - I don't really like toting my passport around with me everywhere - and now I don't have to flash that spectacular picture of a 15-year-old me featured so prominently on my California driver's license! The whole process took about an hour, so that wasn't too bad. When I got back to my bike outside, however, I was somewhat dismayed to note that the front tire had managed to fully deflate itself during that time. The rest of my afternoon consisted of a walking tour of Jamestown, weaving between cruise ship passengers as they waddled their way through the many and sundry tourist traps lining our fair shores. I did eventually get my tire fixed, so I'm freewheeling once again.

Don't let the excitement of today mislead you, though. We're in the middle of the post-holiday slump in the CAOS department, so I've been working in other departments to make up for the lack of available hours. So far I've been a towel jockey at the pool, and done a bit of work in the audio/visual department (from midnight to 4am, no less!). Tomorrow I'll be an apprentice waitress at one of our restaurants, though it should be noted that this is not the same restaurant into which I may or may not have lost children during the New Year's Eve party. Coincidence? Yeah, probably. But I'll still let you draw your own conclusions.


In all honesty, I have no idea what these guys are. There are far too many juvenile fish that have this same nondescript look to them, so I'm not really going to bother trying. I just happen to like the lighting and how they all arranged themselves (for my benefit, no doubt).


This is a shot of a juvenile Longfin Damselfish. When it grows up it'll turn a boring, dusky grey, but in the meantime it has iridescent blue stripes running down its back. The coolest part of this shot, though? The fact that it was taken while my camera was in macro setting. I've been starting to see how close I can get to fish so I can use the macro. There are a few advantages to this, in my personal opinion. It seems to get more detail, and it gives me a little more control over what is the focus of the shot - if I had used the regular setting, my camera probably would've chosen the algae in the background because it's fun like that. You also get a little more of the subject's personality when you're that close, often because they get grandiose notions of being able to chase off the encroaching human (as pictured here). It typically doesn't work so well. Same with the chasing.

Happy New Year!

More like Happy New Year Plus A Week, but who's counting?

Anyway, play-by-play and commentary for last week's video is up, so scroll on down to that post if you'd like to read it (the link is just below the video).

New Year's was pretty fun this year. CAOS put on a variety of kids' programs to keep young ones entertained while their adult entourage partied. While I normally work with older kids (ages 8-18), I was with the younger set that night (ages 4-7), and let me tell you, that was definitely the place to be! We started out the night with dinner with the kids at one of the hotel restaurants, which was pretty tasty. The best part, though, was that they turned our section of the restaurant into a kids' buffet - the food tables were about 2 feet high, the hamburgers were all in miniature (patties, buns, cheese squares, tomatoes, etc were all half the normal diameter), all foods were your typical kids' menu standards but obviously cooked by chefs, and the brownies... oh, the brownies... let's just say that the fact that the brownie tray was equidistant between the dining tables and the restrooms was not overlooked by the CAOS staff as we eagerly volunteered to escort the little ones to go potty.

After that was a scavenger hunt through the hotel, which was very similar to what I imagine herding hyperactive kittens to be like. There were two naturalists assigned to every group of seven kids - and you would think that would be enough - but every group came back with stories of The One That Got Away. Our kids, for example, read one of the clues, which started out by informing them that the next clue would be upstairs, and by the end of the clue had gotten it in their minds that NO! THE CLUE WAS TRYING TO TRICK THEM! In a valiant effort to outwit said clue, they took off sprinting into the fine dining restaurant behind us where people were enjoying very expensive meals in an otherwise intimate setting. It took two naturalists and two increasingly aggrieved waiters to round up the children, who had been eagerly running from table to table to see if someone was perhaps hiding the clue under a tablecloth, or maybe the centerpiece instead. The best part? On the way out the door, one of the waiters smirked at us, saying that we were actually the third group that night to lose kids into the restaurant.

The night finished relatively uneventfully, rolling in the sand with the kids, being chased down the beach with sparklers (I had the sparklers, which we weren't planning on giving the young kids, so they got to try to outrun me instead, and I'll admit that after the restaurant incident, I was definitely not underestimating my foes, small as they may have been), rigging all of the clocks in the kids room to read 11:59 at about 9pm and then doing a countdown, and finally seeing all of them conk out during the opening minute of Finding Nemo, which the rest of the naturalists and I happily watched amid 40-50 unconscious little bodies. I actually made it back to Port Royale by 11pm and watched fireworks and counted down on the beach (in shorts and a tank top, just to rub it in) with everyone else. Happy 2007!


More of those Corky Sea Fingers, this time in full sun mode (all of the polyps are retracted, which is proper daytime procedure). There is also a Flamingo Tongue Snail on one of the branches, as well as a few small wrasses in the background. Pretty much I just liked how the things were growing.


This picture, primarily of French Grunts, was also taken during a CAOS underwater photography program. Grunts are related to snappers, as evidenced by the slope of their heads, and cluster together in the shelter of coral heads. I really haven't seen them do too much else, so aside from clustering, I'm not really sure what they do all day, if anything.