Midnight Kayaks in the Moonless Mangrove Forest

Another day, another tropical adventure.

Yesterday we all got up, as you know, since I blogged about it a bit, and worked the jigsaw puzzle while Janneke worked the academic system. Thence to the beach, where the kids found a log, sixteen inches in diameter and six feet long, bobbing in the waves, and waded out to push it to shore so they could play with it. Which quickly turned into Q rolling it T-ward, over a leg; T howled, I scrambled over and rolled it back.

Onto Q's leg.

What a barrel of monkeys that was. No one seriously hurt, thankfully, and we got to talk about why floating things are so much easier to manipulate than non-floating things. Didn't go the Erie Canal direction with the discussion. Though I could have.

Also read the paper there, where I learned that a tropical storm was bearing down on Puerto Rico, due to arrive Tuesday night. Very exciting stuff - it wasn't a named storm yet, but had a shot at becoming one. I got kind of excited about the prospect, though I'm quite sure it would mean hunkering down in the apartment for a good long while afterward. These power lines in Puerto Rico look like they might just collapse onto the street with no wind at all, let alone if there's a doozy on the way. Saw one hissing and sputtering and spitting sparks just the other night; when I walked past there with the kids yesterday, they had strung some police tape around the area. But the sparks continued to sputter.

Home for lunch, and then I trooped off to work on my project at the market for a while. Got some good stuff. I'll let you know.

Back to the homestead. Did some cleanin', Janneke warmed up dinner (leftove Bebo's food), and we all then set out for Fajardo and the bioluminescent bay.

What's that? It's a mangrove swamp, shallow bay, where microscopic organisms in the top several inches of the water glow when they're moved. So if you stick your arm or your paddle in the water and move it, it sends up shimmering light. We hadn't made it there on our last trip, so we determined to get there this time.

It took a little over an hour from San Juan. Shockingly, there was a bit of a traffic problem at 7:00 PM on a Monday night, so we were a titch concerned we wouldn't make it for our 8:30 scheduled arrival time. But it cleared up just past Carolina and we made great time the rest of the way, where we followed somewhat cryptic directions through Fajardo itself to the municipal park where the tour companies set up shop.

It's on the shore, and seems like it probably commands a nice view during the day. The hills above the bay are covered in houses, and the park itself is crawling at that time of night with at least three different kiosks or tents set up by different companies that lead kayak tours. We parked, found our company, and checked in; then at 9:00, we all assembled - probably 20 of us - to get our sea kayak instructions. T and I would be in one, Q and Janneke in another.

T was very excited about the whole prospect. She got a tiny life jacket with an amber light affixed to it - the only tourist with a light affixed; the rest of us had whistles stuck to our life jackets in case we got separated, but T got the light. And she and I were assigned the position at the front of the column, so the guide at the front, who had a blue light affixed to his back, would always be close to her. Pretty good system. Another guide was permanently at the middle of the column, and another at the back.

We were all assisted into the kayaks, and paddled out to the middle of the bay, where our guide latched onto a parked sailboat and we all held onto each other's kayaks via a short rope at the front, end-to-end like a a string of elephants, until the whole crew was assembled. And then the guide let go of our rope, said "Follow me!" (in English), and we were off.

I was immediately sea sick. The bay where you start is deep enough for sailboats, and unprotected enough to get some wave action, so between the darkness, the rocking, and the need to constantly focus on the sickly-glowing blue light twenty feet in front of me, I was pretty durned uncomfortable to start. But soon we crossed through the sailboats and glided through an opening in the tree-shrubs that surround the interior of the bay, and snaked through a tunnel of vegetation.

Total darkness, almost. I said to T that I was amazed the guide could find his way without a light; she said he's probably done this many times, and can see landmarks (though she didn't use that word) that the rest of us wouldn't even know to look for. Smart kid.

Ten, fifteen twenty minutes? Hard to say. But it passed pleasantly, going with the current through tunnels of mangrove, until we came into a large, circular (appeared so, anyway, in the moonless, starlit dark), almost-perfectly-flat bay. The water was amazingly warm; as we made our way to the center, I noticed that the glowing was happening with my kayak paddles.

It's very, very cool: it looks a lot like the trails of bubbles you sometimes see coming from your canoe paddle, that same formation, but it's all over the paddle, and it sparkles around it in a diminishing way the farther you get out form whatever moved the water. I informed T, who dipped her hand over the side and wiggled it, and giggled at the glow.

They called us together in the middle of the bay and tied us all into a floating pod, whereupon we got a fairly interesting talk on what the organisms are and how / why they do what they do. One theory is that if they all glow when the water moves, this will make other, more delicious bits of food in the water (apart from the microorganisms themselves) more obvious to predators, who will then choose to eat whatever made the motion rather than the organisms that pointed the motion out. Or that they blind a moving fish by glowing all around it, rendering it an ineffective predator. Could be. Then they turned us loose to paddle about for five minutes or so.

We'd drifted close to the edge by this time, and there, the effect is almost zero. So we paddled back to the center and splashed about for a very short time, it seemed, before being summoned together again by a long note on a conch shell. We formed up again and slid back through the tunnel toward the bay.

Right up at the front of the column, I got a great view of some incredibly incompetent paddling by the rear pair in the tour group ahead of ours - it is so, so frustrating to watch people flounder, with al kinds of energy, trying to get in one direction, and almost making it, but then not quite catching on to the way in which the kayak is a moving target, its motion affected continually by whatever you do, needing anticipation and variation in the sort of the placement of your strokes...It's something you can catch on to right away, but can also just utterly escape you. And that's what happened with these two, apparently teenagers. Poor kids - they really looked like they were suffering. But they were stoic and never whined or complained.

Thus did we wend our way back; T, incredibly, was asleep at her end of the kayak when we arrived. They bundled us all into a group again and talked at us for a while before helping us, boat by boat, to the shore; this last gab session was particularly frustrating to me, because I was again bobbing in the boat harbor waves, and was thus again sea sick. But because T was my partner, we got off first, and the quease gradually waned.

They had a litle machine available for us to squeeze our own orange juice, which is a neat, but terrible, idea, because with 20 people, and the time it takes to squeeze each orange half, there's just no way everybody's going to get some. Luckily, though, again, we were with kids, so we went first. The kids drank it (we didn't think it prudent to make everybody wait for Janneke and me), and soon we were changing into dry clothes and sorting through our directions to get back home.

In bed by 1:30 AM. Wow. Fun, great evening, but we're paying for it now. And when I try to, I can still call up some sea sickness; it hangs around in my skin and seeps back down to affect my stomach for some time after the initial bob, it seems. Wonderful.

No pictures - they just don't turn out with the low-level glow. You'll have to trust us.