St Croix - Diving, Dancing, Dreaming

Once a year there is a pilgrimage of contradancers to the island of St Croix, to indulge in a week of good dancing, great company, exciting island activities and of course to escape the heart of winter while it is storming away at home. One year while in St Croix the DC area got 30" of snow and no flights could get in for several days. I was stranded here on this paradise island!

Dive Experience is the oldest continuously running dive operation here in St Croix. They took me on my first "discover SCUBA" tour and made me fall in love with the sport. As the preferred diving vendor for Tropical Dance Vacation they have introduced tens, or maybe hundreds of dancers to scuba over the past many years.

This year the weather has been rough; Sam Halvorson ("Sammy Starfish") tells me that St Croix is in the throes of the "Christmas Winds" a period of heavy northeasterlies that hit the island around Christmas time but seemed to have been absent until now, arriving just in time for when we want to dive. The seas are choppy, making boat travel unpleasant even on short jaunts out of the harbor. Yesterday (Saturday) we had our first fairly decent break and successfully made a long trip to the famed Cane Bay dive sites... without anyone tossing cookies. We did North Star and The Pavilions as our two dives. I got in almost an hour each one. Andrew Donelson and I both took our Aquatica-fitted DSLR cameras for some macro shooting. Results were... pretty good... though I wish I could have previewed on-the-spot to fix some exposure problems.

St Croix has an excellent variety of tourist activities; this year I decided to balance my time between diving and other activities instead of allowing scuba to monopolize my schedule. On Friday I took Sweeney's tour and had a great time; the $45 tour fee is well worth it. Sweeney himself is like a gracious ambasador for the island, showing his enthusiasm for the beauty and diversity of the island and its communities, even after having done this tour for so many years. Today (Sunday) I forewent diving to do Advanced Contras with Lisa Greenleaf (yay!) and an afternoon sail on board The Roseway a beautiful 2-masted schooner with red sails. With these strong winds it should be an exciting journey. Another $45 I am sure will be well spent.