Last beach day of the winter

Not only the last day to find shells, it's the last day to harass the hermit crabs. This time I think I really did one of them a favour. Once again a crab refused to move into a perfectly good shell but I fixed his horribly broken shell by snapping off the part that was causing him to dig up half the beach every time he walked or do they crawl?

He's upside down but you can picture how hard it was to drag that shell around.

Here he is right side up, I blurred out the shell he didn't want so you could see him better.

 In his new sporty model he can now go 10 times faster than he could before.









 Found this baby conch being tossed around by the surf, threw him way out to deeper water in hopes of saving him.

And to cap it off we found another good hunk of rope. Life is good.

Fishing Tournament

Grand Bahama Shipyard put on their 4th Annual Fishing Tournament to raise funds for the schools. Some of our friends entered and managed to catch the biggest tuna.

Somewhere in here there is supposed to be a big tuna.

The team: Ken, Tim, Dave (with fish in his pocket) and Phil. Don't know the 2 on the edges.

The crowds:

Watching the weigh in

Nice water slide for the kids

If you're interested in the shipyard here's a short article Shipyard
It's a massive operation that can actually dry dock cruise ships.  I think it's the only place in the Bahamas that actually gets a job done on time and with expertise. Wonder what their secret is?

Conch - a soon to be lost treasure

 Conch

Check this video out, it's spreading on Facebook, which is good, but I fear the attitude of the ordinary Bahamian fisherman can't be changed and the conch will soon be gone forever.

Here's the link to an organization that's trying to do something about it

 Community Conch

And here are some facts:

• The “queen” conch is a large edible sea snail, a type of marine mollusk.
• Conchs are native to the coasts of the Caribbean, the Florida Keys, the Bahamas, and Bermuda.
• Conchs are herbivores – they eat algae and other tiny marine plants.
• The conch’s main predators include loggerhead turtles, nurse sharks, other snail species, blue crabs, eagle rays, spiny lobsters, and other crustaceans.
• Male and female conchs copulate to reproduce. Mating aggregations can have hundreds or even thousands of individuals.
• Female conchs lay hundreds of thousands of tiny eggs in a sandy egg mass. The larvae emerge after 5 days and may drift on ocean currents for up to a month before settling in suitable habitat on the sea floor.
• During the first year of life, conchs live under the sand during the day and come out to feed on the surface of the sand at night.
• It may take a queen conch at least 5 years to reach maturity. At this stage in life they have a very hard flared lip and can reproduce.
• The queen conch lives an average of 7 years, but are known to live as long as 20 – 30 years.
• Conchs produce natural pearls that come in a range of hues, including white, brown, orange and pink.
• As conchs age, their shell becomes thicker.
• Conch are not necessarily threatened with extinction, but may become so if trade is not tightly controlled.
• It is illegal to take queen conchs in the state of Florida. Commercial and recreational fishing was banned in the 1980′s after conch populations became severely overfished.
• 80% of legal internationally traded conch is consumed in the United States. The smuggling of conch meat into the U.S. is a significant challenge to conch management in The Bahamas.
• Queen conch are vulnerable to overfishing because they are relatively slow to grow, late to mature, aggregate to mate, and are easily harvested in shallow waters.

Beach treasures

Treasures

This fan coral is actually a brilliant purple, photo doesn't do it justice.

This is a close up of the little shells and stones on the beach that will someday be fine sand.

And this is a monetary treasure, rope that once untangled (20 minutes) and dragged home is worth close to $200.

One 45' and one 50' length of good dock line.

Another crab installment

I don't know why I'm so fascinated by hermit crabs and I'm sure everyone has had their fill. Nonetheless I'm posting about crabs once again.

Another perfect day at the beach. I found this confab of crabs and couldn't resist interfering with their lives, once again.

About 40 crabs in this one small spot.

Once again, a crab not in a usual shell.

Three of them weren't (in my opinion) properly shelled so I thought I'd try to encourage them to move by placing wonderful new shells right in front of them. It didn't work. They refused to move out even though one had a broken shell, one was too big for his shell and one wasn't even in a shell!

At about this time I noticed that a boat that had been cruising up and down the beach had dropped anchor at the "picnic" spot and to our dismay were actually coming ashore! Were they not aware this was OUR beach?

We had no choice but to pack up and move on down the road to this beach.


Unfortunately, for the crabs I had found an old pail and they were coming with us. I wasn't done with them yet.

Even under captivity they refused to move out. One of them did give a shell a very thorough inspection but I guess it just wasn't good enough.
 

The one on the left has only half a shell, the one on the right doesn't even have a shell and the one not in the photo is way too big for his shell. Eventually I gave up and set them free. All three of them made a mad dash away from us.

March Miscellanea

Awoke one morning to this sight, which, until I stepped outside to take this photo, I thought was mist on the canal. To my dismay it was smoke. Small, slow burning fires are commonplace around here and they don't bother putting them out unless it threatens someone's house, and I'm pretty sure that someone has to be an important someone. All you can do is wait for the wind to shift, which it did a few hours later.

"Smoke on the water, A fire in the sky........"

And another mat, this time made out of 80 plastic grocery bags crocheted together. There is no recycling here and they love to double bag anything that weighs more than a loaf of bread so we have a surplus of bags.

18 x 34

 Even worse than the sight of smoke outside your door is this, which can only mean we are starting to put things away and packing up to go back north to the cold.

I managed to back all the way to the ramp on my first try!

A great day at the beach. Found a newly beached sea biscuit and when I saw the underside I hoped it was still alive so I put it back into the water.

The pale green center looks alive.

This was beyond hope so I didn't try putting it back in the water.

And this is clinging to hope despite its location.

And speaking of hope - I found this beautiful shell on the beach:

Turned it over to find it was slightly broken but no matter, it was still beautiful.

But I couldn't take it home it was inhabited! So much for hope.

Last but certainly not least - Celebrating Gerry's birthday with a surprise Happy Hour party.

Birthday boy and some of the 24 guests

Naked on the Beach

I am so excited that we finally caught a hermit crab moving into a new house. We found a bunch of crabs having a meeting. Many of them ran off as soon as we came, which is very unusual as they typically play possum. Gerry ran back for the camera while I kept the big guy from entering his new shell. I have no idea where his old shell is, perhaps the new tenant ran off as we approached. I blocked the entrance with a stone which he tried to push out of my hand and out of his way and I couldn't believe how strong he was.

The big purple thing is a crab without a home. I think the greyish speckled part on his right side is what he uses to latch on to the inside of the shell so you can't pull him out.

Inside his new abode and probably very relieved.