After a week with many many interviews, some interesting, some scary, some weird, starting work at 7 am, finishing at 20:00, going to bed at 21:30, we deserve a nice weekend!

On Friday we finally managed to go for our first dive wish Shoal Bay Scuba. After a little refresher in the water we went out to dive on one of the wrecks that they have positioned around Anguilla for the dive tourists, and it was a fantastically easy dive, 20-25 m, great visibility, no currents or anything, and a wreck with quite a number of fish; there was  even a car still in the wreck! We saw turtles, parrotfish, damselfish, barracudas and some other things, and tiny little pieces of coral.

It was then a lazy afternoon, and I ventured out for a hike, that was on my map… the only way  could go was along the beach, so, I was quite disappointed, but on the bright side I found a place very close to where we live that rent out paddleboards!!!

Saturday was another busy work day, got loads of things done, scheduled some interviews, and did some… one in probably the poorest place in Anguilla, with a single mother with 7 children squatting in someones shed, and one with a big dog- though there was a fence around the house so he jumped against the fence to get to me and tried to get through. But lucky for me the owner of the house protected me from the dog J

Sunday we were invited to go out with Captain Rolins on his Catamaran Chocolat, and we did not capsize! We had a fantastic trip to little Prickly Pear Island, an excursion on the Island (while Sarah went snorkelling) and on the way a trip to little Sandy Island for lunch. Again, Sarah went for a snorkel, while I was talking to Roland,- and she nearly gave him a heart attack diving too shallow and being hit by waves!

After the trip we went to pick up Selina… and off we went to the Dune  Preserve to see Bankie Banx – and Angguillan International Reggea Legend -at the Moonsplash Festival 2013 http://www.bankiebanx.net/ ! Amazing! It was absolutely amazing!

So much for now… not to talk about our next door neighbour, an 84 year old reverend who mixes a mean cocktail, Kashers birthday, and many more things…

Pia

This weeks entertainment included an intense couple of days training our new surveyors – Immario and Chavez.  Immario is our body-builder-brown-belt-large-car-driving-studly and Chavez is his tall-polished-nail-steamed-fish-romantic-natured-7-day-aventist counterpart.  We went through the theory – how you are supposed to interview in an ideal world… and then threw them into some very ‘theory testing’ interviews.  Immario and Pia went to see a rich American ex-pat with a botox filled face, and poor old Chavez and I ended up at this house with a lovely old man with one leg, who knew nothing about coral reefs and kept telling me to ‘speak English woman, I can’t understand you’.  Chavex and I then went on to interview Captain Butty (picture to follow) who had already been interviewed by Clare and Pia but enjoyed it so much he didn’t mention that he had already answered all the questions!  Pia and Chavez were stuck with a very high rasta.

The next day Immario and I had a spare 40 minutes before interviewing the barman from North Hill so we went to the edge of the Point (a rocky outcrop at the bottom of a cliff) to check out the wildlife.  Getting back into his 2 tonne ford explorer we realized we were stuck… the wheels kept spinning but we couldn’t get any traction on the bare rock and loose sand.  We slipped closer and closer to the edge…. With half the car stuck down a limestone gully.  We tried putting cardboard and twigs under the wheels, reversing slowly and then fast but nothing would budge.  Immario started to sweat – it is his mum’s car (he’s only 19 bless) and he had to pick her up from work in a couple of hours.  I phoned everyone we knew to try to get someone to pull us out.  Eventually, after 2 hours in the hot sun the barman Keith sent some friends to our rescue.  They made us sit in the back to add weight while he gunned the throttle….. and we slipped even further down the cliff.  I have never sweated as much – NERVOUS PASSENGER at the best of times.  Through a combination of us pushing and a lot of luck we finally made it up the hill covered head to toe in dust.

Scared the poor lad off – we haven’t seen him since!

Thursday was also a catalogue of errors… visa renewal, lost phones, broken internet, a wonderful but long and unfocused interview with the ex-prime minister of the Island Sir Emile Gumbs, horrible news about a close friend of mine, moved villa (a whole other story) and eventually ended up at a massive birthday party on the beach.  I fondled Bankie Banx’s (famous Reggae artist) necklace which he didn’t seem too pleased about, and we danced the night away.

It’s been a long week!  Tomorrow we are strategizing (if that is even a word) and have three interviews including one on Sandy Island where I plan to snorkel for turtles, and then Sunday is our day off.  Yeah!  Day off… to do dissertation ;(

Warm wishes from the islands x Sarah x

It’s Sunday and the internet is working surprisingly well for the first time in 3 weeks 😉  Look out for those catch-up e-mails!  I also fixed the gallery below so you should actually be able to see the pictures now.

We had a terrible steak on Thursday night.  So tough we have put it in a plastic bag in the fridge ready to be used to distract those packs of dogs we keep encountering.  I figure we can throw them the steak and will then have at least 5 minutes while they break their teeth on it before they attack again.

Yesterday was a lovely day.  We did some more household interviews in Sandy Ground and North Hill.  Pia hit upon 3 deaf ladies and a woman with some form of dementia…. I talked to Mr Cat, an older gentleman with 20 ginger cats.

In the evening we went to the 30th Annual International food night at the beautiful Catholic church.  All the society people were there dressed up in their finest.  Live music from a steal drum band.  Pia had a rather large gin – 70% gin, 20% ice, 10% tonic.  Apparently the tonic is cheaper than the gin. I ran around collecting tasters from all the tables and hiding then in the car and we did a ‘meals of wheels’ service and dropped it off for the cat man on our way home. Now the pimp car smells of west african goat curry. There was some great food from the Phillippines, Trinidad, Anguilla, Italy, St. Kitts and Dominica… we came home stuffed and had a rather esoteric conversation on the nature of objectivity.

Tonight we are hosting a small dinner party for our new friends.  Pia is cooking Thai green curry and  I am trying my hand at spring rolls and peanut noodles.  I figure serve enough rum and everything will go swimmingly!

Pictures to follow.  The latest pictures are from my shopping trip to the Jamaican organic farm (yes those are tomatoes!).  He uses large white rabbit poo as fertilizer.

Sarah

Hello blog readers!

Sorry we haven’t posted anything in over a week! It’s been very busy with our first community meeting, a visit from the Boss lady (Clare) and attending a national fisheries meeting today. I think Pia has also developed a fear of the blog…I’m hoping a few rums later in the week might help her over it! There is no weekend fun to report about as we’ve been constantly working… (sad face and small violin).

The community meeting was great – we got about 17 people talking about fishing, tourism and the community, creating these huge wall maps and timelines of different marine activities in Sandy Ground. I think everyone who attended had a really good time and we certainly learnt a lot! We introduced the ipads for mapping and it was just lovely to see our strapping, young Anguillan helpers putting dots on the maps where the older ladies used to swim and take their ‘seabaths’.

As I said we have been fortunate to have Clare with us all week. It meant I got to shoot off round the island in the car showing her the sights, all the beautiful beaches, the desalinization plant, the power station the pilot agriculture project etc. etc. all the sites environmental scientists get excited about. Much to Clare’s disappointment I couldn’t quite locate the entrance to the landfill site so we settled by taking pictures of the erosion at Gwen’s Reggae bar while eating a fish sandwich.

We also got Clare doing some interviews. At the moment we are working in a small village called North Hill. I dropped Clare and Pia off outside one of our randomly selected addresses and as they both walked towards the house we became aware of the most enormous black bloke, standing in his underwear holding a large knife. I started to worry that I maybe this wasn’t a good idea, and I kept the engine running just in case they needed a quick escape… but it turned out they were a very friendly couple. The guy was chopping up a lion fish (hence the knife) and his wife was the lead singer in a band… so on Sunday we went down to the beach to watch her perform… most excellent.

I’ve put some photos up but I am hoping Pia will write about what she remembers most from the last week. I want to shout out to my mum whose birthday it is on Saturday – Happy birthday mum – I’m so sorry I am missing it again ;( x x

Time is flying….

And I am still trying to catch up on our weekend adventures!

After a long night in the Pump House, with a life band playing and people teaching me Caribbean style dancing- will have to practice soon if I can still move my bum without moving either my legs or shoulders next time- we had a lie-in on Sunday. We then decided to explore a bit more of the South coast, and take our snorkelling gear (I just bought new mask and snorkel on Saturday, and went for a nice swim in Feathers Bay. Sarah was lucky enough to see a barracuda following her, but sadly as soon as I turned around he was gone!!!

Next we decided to go to Savannah Bay, further up in the East- and this took our low lying black pimp car to a real test! Off the road it went- and let me tell you, I really really now miss my little blue car!!! Little Blue would have loved it, black pimp car had to work very hard to go across all the rocks, drains etc… into the middle of no-where. And then we arrived, at the end of the road- and there was a small little remote beach cafe, complete with a 1 day old baby goat resting behind some chairs. And there I had some absolutely amazing fish (to eat). The little goat was very curious and came to say hello and nibble on my fingers, very brave little thing.

Well fed we went to explore the beautiful empty beach, and went snorkelling… there were plenty of fish, and we were just about skimming over the remains of the reefs. And suddenly I got trapped! I had no idea where to go any more, the waves slightly pushed us up and down, but I was so close to the bottom, and all the crevices were covered with spiky sea urchins! This was the first time ever in my life that I got really panicky in the water- and that in 30 cm deep water!

However, once out of there I have to say it was a fantastic day it was!

And the black car did a good job- I guess it never imagined it would ever be challenged that badly in its life!!

There’s been so much going on Pia and I are both writing blog posts today!

We are getting some great information from the interviews.  This week we focused on ‘key informants’ (makes them sound like prison rats!) – people who should have a lot to say about the sea.  One of the questions we ask ‘do you know of any rules or regulations related to the sea?’.  Most people say they have heard about the ban on turtle fishing, and when we ask if this rule is enforced, the response is generally ‘yes’ because there was this one guy who got caught with turtle meat and had to pay an $8000 fine!… I’ll come back to this..

Somebody asked what we do all day……..So, we’ve been happily driving around introducing ourselves, arranging interviews, conducting interviews and entering the data.  We are using Dragon software which is a headphone you speak into and it types out what you say – very cool.  Pia and I both have sore throats because we are literally talking ALL day 😉  About 5:00pm we’ll go down to the beach, have a beer, maybe some dinner and try and pick up some more interviews for the next day.  Lately we’ve had quite a few interviews later in the evening.  We also use the time to catch up on work e-mails, make plans for the community meetings, write reports / blogs / plans etc.

Dawn – the lovely lady who we rent our car and villa from, put us in touch with her brother who is a fisherman.  One conversation over the phone with Pia and he were hooked on each other.  We were immediately invited around for dinner on Friday night!  This guy is a REAL character, kinda got the gay hospitality thing going on, tells tales like a sea dog, hates authority and is funny as hell.  We laugh our way through the evening with his random assortment of guests eating freshly prepared creole snapper, veggies, passion fruit lassi’s, sweet potato and some kind of polenta thing made by rolling your hips around.  He made us drink his special tea made from Moringa and lemongrass (look it up – it has amazing properties including 100’s of health benefits and is an aphrodisiac).  We never actually got to the interview but the conversation comes round to fishing…. He gets his spear gun out from under the bed, talks about the fish he catches and mentions that turtle meat is soooo sweet… then they all laugh…. And it suddenly clicks!  The first fricking dinner we go to is at the house of the guy everyone’s been talking about – the fool that got caught with turtle meat!  Not the best image for two marine conservationists!!  He said it was his wife – a judge from Dominica who he was going through a divorce with who called the fisheries department to dob him in as an act of revenge.  He was so animated saying that the governor, the chief magistrate and the chief minister had all been around his house for thanksgiving eating turtle a few months before!  All in all a wonderful night.

I suppose I should briefly mention that Saturday we hired a great, young Anguillan to work with us on the surveys, we saw a man, go at another ma,n on the beach with a machete (some kind of family feud).  We also went to the pump house for dinner, met some lovely people, danced to the live band, and Pia transfixed the locals with her German hips! 😉  “Keep circular movements between the chest and the knees”!