Snorkeling: Where's Aerial?

I had never been snorkeling before, it seemed easy enough. You have to swim, breathe through your mouth, and watch out for boats. In the Caribbean there are many places to snorkel and we found some really great places. Using our Go-Pro we took pictures of some of the things we saw as well and made a video.

On Tortola we went to two places,  Brewer's Bay and Smuggler's Cove. Brewer's was amazing underwater. We could see where the reef begins and the beach/swimming area ends. The reef is like a wall, leading into a little underwater city. The reefs look like little sky scrapers and the fish look like commuters. They move in between the beach and the reefs in schools, always staying together, even when disturbed by the occasional pelican plucking his lunch from their group. Which, strangely enough happened to me as I was watching them, the pelicans come from to sky, crashing into the water when they see the schools of fish, I was just a little too close once and almost became a victim of the plummeting.

The darkness from the reef is easy to see from the beach, so you can know where to look for the good snorkeling spots.  Both Smuggler's Cove and Brewer's it is very easy to see where to snorkel at because of all the darkness from the reefs. Smuggler's becomes very difficult to snorkel because the water isn't very deep and the reefs almost come up to the surface. When snorkeling you have to be very careful of the reefs because they are very delicate. They have many protective methods as well. The red coral burns, it is called "Fire Coral". When you are swimming near any of the coral it feels like it is sucking you in a little bit, it is very sharp, so touching it must be avoided. It also takes hundreds of years for it to form, so destroying it really is bad.  There are sea anemones, that pop in an out and when you get close to them they retreat back. They look like flowers and when they retreat they look like the stems without the flowers.

While on Peter Island, the dive shop will take you on a snorkeling tour of a place called "The Indians". This place looks like a bunch of hills underwater and each of them was full of coral and fish. Every once in a while you can see mooring blocks with chains on them. Occasionally we did some skin diving, this is where you swim down deep and hold your breath. When you come back up you blow the water out of the mouth spout from the mask and you can continue snorkeling. At the Indians the reefs are very tall and the water very deep. So Randy and I did some skin diving. I went down 10-15 feet, at least. We saw really beautiful fish, eels, different kinds of coral, and sponges.

Even when we weren't at "The Indians" we snorkeled around Peter Island beaches for fun, mostly in Dead Man's Bay. Randy found an octopus in a jar on the beach when he was picking up random trash and bottles, which there wasn't a lot, but most see trash we found was glass.  The octopus wasn't in the mood to come out of the bottle, but it had huge eyes and looked at us with such intensity and curiosity. We put it back in the water out deep and left it alone. We also found a really cool red sponge and sea anemones and it was amazing that they hadn't been crushed.

All and all this was an experience not to be missed. The video is on YouTube at the link below.


http://youtu.be/poWmt83sgOw?list=UUFQ62MVldEyqRiafBBbru7Q