Here's the equation we fed into the vacation computer: Wife is a landscape artist currently working on a series of paintings in national parks. I like to dabble in underwater photography, particularly in shallow environs while freediving. Nine-year-old son likes warm water and waveless coves, and has wallpaper depicting Johnny Depp as the piratical Capt. Jack Sparrow on his PC.
This is what the vacation computer disgorged: Spend your spring break at the Cinnamon Bay Campground in the national park at St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands.
And that's what we did.
The Islands
First, a word about the Virgin Islands. This collection of small islands and smaller cays lies just east of Puerto Rico at the northern end of the Windward Islands, the arc running south through Antigua, Guadeloupe, Dominica, Martinique, St. Lucia, Barbados, Grenada and Trinidad & Tobago, defining the eastern perimeter of the Caribbean Sea. Of volcanic origin with steep terrain, they are ringed by shallow coral reefs. They were first inhabited by humans when peaceable Arawaks migrated from South America around 100 B.C., only to be overrun by the more warlike Caribs in the early 1400s.
Just a few decades later, Columbus visited the islands on his second trip to the new world in 1493, naming them for the 10,000 virgins said to attend the somewhat mythical St. Ursula of Christian legend. The islands changed hands among colonial powers until Denmark ended up laying claim to the southernmost three main islands -- St. Thomas, St. John and St. Croix -- while the others passed into British hands. In the 1700s and early 1800s planters established sugar plantations tended by Africans brought over as slave labor. In the mid-1800s the slaves were emancipated and the bottom fell out of the global sugar market with the advent of competition from sugar beets. The planters drifted away, while the freed slaves formed the bulwark of the continuing population.
In 1917, the United States bought St. Thomas, St. John and St. Croix from Denmark for $300 an acre in order to have a military outpost in the region, they in the process becoming the U.S. Virgin Islands. In the 1950s, one of the Rockefellers with an environmentalist inclination bought up thousands of acres of St. John and donated it as a national park. With a few subsequent additions, the park now accounts for about half of the land on the island. Thus while St. Thomas is home to an airport and is almost constantly visited by cruise ships, the atmosphere on St. John is decidedly more low-key. The rest of the 20-odd islands of various sizes stretching to the northeast are known as the British Virgin Islands.
The Trip
We left Los Angeles International on an American Airlines red-eye flight at 11 p.m. on Thursday of the week before Easter week. Five hours later, we were in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where we were required to vacate the plane for an hour while they cleaned and conducted a security sweep. Two and a half hours later, we were in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where we boarded a propellar plane for the final half-hour hop to St. Thomas. Unfortunately our check-in luggage didn't make it onto the same plane, so we had to wait in the airport at Charlotte Amalie in St. Thomas another hour and a half for our four bags to make it on the next flight. (Actually we considered ourselves lucky, as we've heard many horror stories of luggage on American Airlines flights in the Caribbean getting lost for two days or more at a time.)
By mid-afternoon Friday we were racing across St. Thomas in a taxi van as our driver made a valiant attempt to get us to Red Hook, on the easternmost end of the island, for the 3 p.m. ferry to St. John. Thankfully the ferry pilot was not as clock-conscious as our driver, so although we pulled up a couple of minutes after the hour we made it onboard with time to spare. A few minutes and a quick hop across the channel between the islands later, we were in Cruz Bay on the westernmost end of St. John. After 20 minutes in an open-air taxi, we were at the U.S. National Park Service campground in Cinnamon Bay.
The main drawing card for the campground as far as we were concerned was that it was the only lodging on St. John directly on the beach. The campground offered accommodations ranging from bare campsites to tents to cottages. Since my wife's appetite for camping is normally limited, she opted for the last of these. We ended up with a nice 15- by 15-foot room on the edge of the trees where they meet the sand, serenaded by jungle insects at night and surrounded by land crab burrows, enormous termite nests in trees, flittering nocturnal bats and braying donkeys. (These last are the descendants of pack animals that schlepped goods in plantation days, turned loose in the wild when automobiles arrived.)
After a quick dip in the ocean and an improvised dinner, we turned in early to get a good start on Saturday. Our first order of business then was to find the one and only hardware store on St. John and lay in an ample supply of paint thinner and turpentine -- solvents critical to my wife's art undertakings but strictly forbidden in plane travel. Saturday afternoon I did some initial reconnaissance swimming/diving around Cinnamon Bay to try to find where the reefs were. Although most of the bay's floor was the fine white sand of coral beaches, the shoreline was punctuated here and there by reefs of varying sizes.
Given the warm water (ranging from 79F to 81F), my equipment was simple -- swim trunks, 1mm rashguard (mostly for sun protection), 2mm neoprene socks, 3-foot-long Omer Millennium fins, Omer Asia low-volume mask, Riffe snorkel, dive watch and weight belt. Although I'd worn only 6 pounds on a belt the previous summer in the Mediterranean, I'd put on a few pounds of positive-buoyancy adipose tissue (a.k.a. fat), so I found 8 pounds of lead to work the best. Later I took to wearing a scarf-like cap in the water for more sun protection.
Sunday
This was to be my first session in the water with my Oly 5050 camera. I decided to spend some time on the reef I'd located in Cinnamon Bay right adjacent to our campsite. Alas, after entering the water I found that my Suunto D3 dive watch was on the fritz. Note to self: leaving your watch in a coffee cup of freshwater overnight to wash off the salt keeps it powered up in dive mode, running down the battery prematurely.
The reef nearest to our cottage was roughly circular, extending from the shoreline out perhaps a couple of hundred feet. Depending on tide, the depth directly above the reef ranged from a few feet to squeakers in spots where the coral nearly broke the surface. Out at the far end of the reef it dropped off abruptly into a sandy bottom in perhaps 20 feet of water, offering a mini-wall.
One of the first fish to catch my attention was a balloonfish prowling in the outer reaches of the reef:
I also ran across a pair of Caribbean reef squid in short order:
My eye was also caught by a colorful fish called a red hind that, on closer inspection, revealed a pair of crustacean parasites called isopods on its cheeks:
I noticed a number of these parasites on other fish throughout the trip, such as this French grunt:
The main fish life on the reef, however, was clouds and clouds of tiny silver baitfish:
These were pursued by larger fish, most often barjacks:
which in turn were the prey of dive-bombing pelicans:
The reef was home to a number of handsome outcroppings of brain coral:
Also distinctive was a West Indian sea egg -- a relative of sea urchins -- chewing its way across the reef:
Amid the coral were numerous sea fans:
After a stint with the camera, I was joined for some easy snorkeling by my favorite buddy:
Continue on to Virgin Islands Trip Report, Part 2