We have a group of people on island who have gotten together to swim every Saturday morning at 8 am for around 20 years. The group is called “The Fin Folk”. One of the long time members, Sheelagh, comes up with a shcedule roughly quarterly and we swim from one beach to another, on different parts of the island.

About ten years ago when I returned home from massage school in Berkely, CA, my friend, Marie (aka “our little Marie” or “Mah-wee”) asked me if I’d like to swim in the Buck Island to Buccaneer race (5.5 miles) at the end of October on a team with her. I had never been much of a swimmer, but, since moving to the island and working on Big Beard’s boats, I felt more comfortable in the water than I had at any other time in my life. I said I’d give it a shot. So we got together a couple of times a week after work and swam. Then one Saturday morning she introduced me to this group called “The Fin Folk”. We swam from Cane Bay to the Carambola Beach Resort. It’s about a 1.5 mile swim, with amazing underwater sights to see. Some of the swimmers are purists and just wear goggles. I want to enjoy each swim, so I wear my mask and snorkel and usually fins, too. Marie and I were the only two person team in the race that year (the rest of the teams had three swimmers), and we won a blue ribbon for first place in the team division! Not bad for my first swim race!

Anyway, since then I have been swimming sporadically with the Fin Folk. They are a great bunch of people and the swims are generally fun and beautiful. So Michael and I decided to swim this Saturday. We started at Boiler Bay, on the east end and ended at the St. Croix Yacht Club (2 Miles). There were 6 of us. All guys except me. The water was a little rough and the currents variable. In some spots we felt like we were flying and in others we seemed to be going nowhere. We saw a few small stingrays, a spotted eacgle ray and a small turtle. This swim is often quite boring because the topography is mostly sea grass, so not much to see for the most part.
It felt good, though, and I could have gone farther.

After that we went home to have “brunch” and get some work done around the house. We need to rearrange things in the carport so Michael can start disassembling the junk rover and storing parts in an organized space. We had about a 3-4 hour window of opportunity before we had to get to the salon to get our hair cut. We got quite a bit done, too. I’ll be making a trek to the flea market to donate unneeded items ASAP.

Karen, our hairdresser, is a neat lady. She has 3 tortoises for pets that she brings to work every day. A few years ago, when she first got them they could fit in the palm of her hand. Now they are about a foot long and it’s more challenging to move them, but she does it anyway. She always tells us stories about their antics and how they respond to the things she does. I never realized they could be so interactive.

After that, we visited my daughter at her store, Gems Direct to check on her and see if her long lost kitty, Sebastian, had been found. She had gotten a call from someone responding to her “Lost Cat” poster and we were keeping our fingers crossed that it was him. It was actually a female that this person had seen. So that was disappointing . I’m thinking that maybe he is trying to get back to the condo he recently moved from. It happens and has happened to us once, when our friend, Charlie, “borrowed” one of our cats and the cat traveled the mile back home in just a few hours.

Nikki got busy with customers, so we went down to the waterfront to get a bite to eat at the Fort Christian Brew Pub.. We started, of course, with some of their home brewed beer. I had the pale ale and Michael had the brown ale. Mmmmm. We were happy to see that they once again have fried pickles on their menu. We ordered those as an appetizer. For entrees, Michael had a “small” order of ribs and I had a black bean quesadilla. Everything was yummy and our tummies were full again. It’s a great place to sit and watch the people go by. And there’s always plenty of activity in the harbor with boats coming and going, people feeding fish and birds. The breeze was very slight, but enjoyable when it blew, and the setting sun created muted, but lovely colors through the haze in the western sky.

Tags: St. Croix

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 10:16 am and is filed under St. Croix, Terry Talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.