About turtles, Thanksgiving and other important matters

So here it is what I learned about turtles until now. It would be almost impossible to tell if Green turtle or Hawksbill turtle shows her head above the water for a brief moment. But there are other clues to help determine which is which - Greens are vegetarians and feed on turtle grass (appropriate name, isn't it?), Hawksbills feed primarily on sponges. So in sandy grassy bays (like Coco bay on Barbuda) one would mostly see Greens and over the reefs Hawksbills. 

I checked all the photos of turtles I have to see which kind they are and most of them were Hawksbills, which was to be expected, since I snorkel on reefs and take most of the photos there. Nevertheless, there is also one photo of Green turtle in the collection. And if you  look closely - Green turtle on first photo is sitting in turtle grass....

while Hawksbill turtle on this photo is swimming over the reef. 

Besides learning about turtles we had a laundry day in Deep bay, and on Wednesday evening we sailed to Falmouth Harbour to meet our friends Dana and Wayne. We sailed off quite late to allow the laundry to dry. We passed Five islands bay ....

... and we had a gorgeous view of Montserrat. And the peak of volcano was not sitting in clouds, so the smoke was clearly visible.

Little later there was a beautiful sunset.

We reached Falmouth already in the dark and it was not easy to enter the bay and anchor among other boats, in spite of the fact that we've been here so many times before. Darkness really makes a difference, especially distances are very hard to estimate.

On Thursday Dana and Wayne sailed into the bay and anchored next to us. We met in the dockyard in Rodney Bay in St Lucia and were afterwards neighbors on the anchor in Rodney Bay for quite a while. They surprised us with an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner that evening. They did a great job in the kitchen and we had a perfect dinner with turkey, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing and even pumpkin pie. Check their blog at www.galleywenchtales.com .

On Saturday we sailed to Nonsuch Bay. We passed Eric Clapton's house and it seems to me he has a good taste in rocks. He surely picked one of the prettiest one.

We were fishing of course and caught two Ceros.

In Nonsuch bay we swam, snorkeled, and did several boat project. The biggest was waterproofing of our bimini. It was successful, there were several showers the day after and only few drops of water came through.

I am learning about corals too. I took a few photos while snorkeling around Bird island so it was easier for me to determine the kind with the help of my books. It is difficult to remember even the colorful fish in enough details to find it in the book, with the corals it's impossible.

Here is a nice Fire coral.

 Here are the Brain corals - Symmetrical Brain coral on the left and smaller Grooved Brain coral on the right.

Another Grooved Brain coral, nice and round.

 We were mostly eating fish - captain cleaned and filleted the fish ....

... and I cooked them with almonds and butter, with creamy polenta on the side and tomato salad.

Beside the fish we were eating a lot of bananas, this is the huge bunch that Ambroz, Peter, Janez (our visitors) and captain brought from hike up the Deshaies river more than two weeks ago. In the meantime bananas got ripe, most of them at the same time. We've eaten them for breakfast, during the day, we made banana mikshakes, we put them on peanut butter banana sandwiches...

 On Tuesday we sailed back to Falmouth. The sea was really rolly and bumpy and there weren't much wind, so sailing was not very pleasant. At the entrance to Falmouth we caught this Little Tunny (it is really called so). So it looks like another fish day ....