Gallery

Hummingbird overload at Discovery Park

This past weekend (June 13th & 14th) I spent each morning at Discovery Park, arriving before 7am each day to coincide with the peak of activity by small birds. Specifically, I went looking for rufous hummingbirds before they begin migrating south to Mexico in the next two months.

What ended up happening (after a nice person in the park told me where he’d seen dozens of hummingbirds buzzing about) was probably the two best days of hummingbird photography I’ve had yet. More importantly, it gave me a lot of practice shooting these tiny, fast creatures, as well as an idea on an equipment modification I could make that I’m going to have to try to fabricate (possibly with the help of a 3D printer) which, if I end up doing, I’ll detail in a future blog post.

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British Virgin Islands 2015 Trip – Part 4

Wednesday was our “down-time” day where we weren’t sailing anywhere, had no solid plans, and folks were allowed to do what they liked. Per the previous entry, a number of us had signed up for a snorkeling trip, which started at 10am. Several of us had also signed up for the “Out of Bounds Hobie Cat Adventure,” and I’d made arrangements to meet with the local kite-surfing instructor for a lesson in kite surfing.

There won’t be many pictures in this post–during this relaxing day I didn’t carry my camera around much, partially due to all the in/on-the-water activities.

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British Virgin Islands 2015 Trip – Part 3

The Search For Alcohol

As we were going to be leaving relatively early the next day, it was a good time to evaluate our food and drink supplies and restock, which I did, with the help of several of my crew. However, the grocery store at the Virgin Gorda Yacht Harbor didn’t have much of a selection, and one of the crew of the other boat had already purchased the store’s entire supply of Pusser’s.

Lucky for me, that’s when Glenn showed up again.

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British Virgin Islands 2015 Trip – Part 2

(For part one, go here. To see Charles’ part-one post about the trip on his blog, go here.)

Dinner at the Cooper Island Beach Club

That evening all seventeen of us joined together at the Cooper Island Beach Club for our dinner reservations. It’s a nice place with some pretty darn good food: I had the seared scallops & pork belly as an appetizer (which was quite delicious) and some blackened mahi-mahi as my main course (also good). Others had things like conch fritters, tuna, West Indian chicken curry with roti, and pork, while we all had some really tasty cocktails. Not just painkillers, this time!

After dinner my crew hung out near a wifi hotspot for a while, uploading a few pictures and checking in with loved ones, before I took them back in groups (since we couldn’t just fit all nine of us into the dinghy at once). A few went to bed, a few stayed up a while longer in the quiet, and I showed them the game of shining a bright flashlight into the water to see what we could attract.

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British Virgin Islands 2015 Trip – Part 1

“Hold the flight, there’s 15 more behind me coming!” I yelled, out of breath after sprinting down the Miami terminal from my previous flight. Our flight from St. Thomas had gotten in on time, but a jet with mechanical problems was stuck in our original gate, and we’d had to wait for the new gate–only a few doors down from our connecting flight to Seattle–to be available. It turned our 45 minute connection into less than 5 minutes.

But I should back up to the beginning of the trip if I’m going to tell this correctly.

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