Day 3 in St. Croix: Flying with DA20

Date: 10.03.2014

It's been a long time since I updated this blog and how our last days of the holiday went, but I have a pretty good reason for it added to the bad internet connections during our trip. Still I'm sorry it's been taking too long, but better late than never, eh?

Me yesterday after the dives and our cute and beautiful apartment, no I wasn't tired at all or feeling sick.. Timo is bringing my camera bag out of the car because I wanted to spot a humming bird next to our apartment but it didn't come back before I headed to bed...

Today I was still feeling a little ill and hurting all over, but I promised to accompany stnz on his first solo flight at the Caribbean. Yesterday he flew the same plane with a local instructor and got the "all clear" to use his new FAA-license and fly alone. Help.

Fluffy seats waiting for us

Gauges and hairy legs (not mine!)

One of the US Air force-fatties

Stnz did not reserve the plane yesterday because "there's no reservations, it will be free when you come here" -excuse, which I've been hearing a lot and which has been backfiring oh so many times.. :D Of course the plane was taken and the reception didn't understand stnz that he wanted to use the plane, so we sat there over an hour waiting for the thing. I was a little too tired and ill so waiting the extra time without food and drink was pretty annoying.

Finally the girls who were flying the DA20 came down from the sky and we got our plane. Stnz was a bit nervous doing his pre-check, but I assured myself that this trip was fun enough so dying now in a plane accident wouldn't matter so much :D.

Point Udall (Easternmost point) was behind that last mountain

Can you drop me off there, I would want to go a little deeper now?

After takeoff I noticed that the radio traffic was very quiet compared to Finland or Iceland where I've flown earlier with stnz, of course San Juan was ~busyish but there are 2 airports and much bigger planes taking off.

First we flew straight to a rain cloud and stnz decided to circle the island counter clockwise, which made my photographing almost impossible. On few places he did make some circles around, but mostly so that his side was down.

Raining, yet again

Point Udall, somewhere there were my sunglasses. I don't have a Nikon so more ZOOM didn't help finding them.

The easternmost place of the US, where we hiked on the 1st day

DA20 felt pretty OK plane to me, little prone to turbulence, but because of it's size and build that is kinda no-brainer. For photography purposes the flare was way too apparent, and only decent way to take images on that plane is to put your camera's lens outside of the dome's hatch. Something I won't be doing anytime soon with my luck. DA40 seemed to generate less flare, but Cessna is still better (for photography). Unless it's a plane with a door for suici.... parachutist, when you can open the whole side and take pictures that way (and I realllly want to do that someday!).

The dish is directed straight to the mountains, weird. On the right of it was the beach where we snorkeled

There's The Wall

Buck Island, reef national monument, which I was told to be the best place to dive in St. Croix

Place to add to my TODO-list next time

Some cheap beach houses

Our landing was interesting - there was some heavy rain just in front of the runway and we had to circle around it. There was a point when the visibility through the dome was almost nonexistent. But fortunately it cleared up in time before we landed. The tower's warning "the runway is wet" did create slight amusement in the cockpit while looking at the rain front "No shit Sherlock" :D

The Carambola bay & resort where we dived yesterday (Sweet bottom), and yes, those are stnz hairy legs.

Fredriksted's pier and NOAA-ship, our dive site tonight

Yeses, we can see the rain near the runway/airport.

It's raining again (and yet again, not men)

Landing

Safely returned.

After this, it was time to go back to our apartment, move our stuff to a hotel for one night and go diving.

Video of the flight, the gopro was situated like this because sntz was more interested of getting his aviation club some kind of feel of the plane which they're considering buying:

Day 1 in St. Croix: let's go east, snorkel and night walk at Christiansted

Date: 08.03.2014

After we got all our stuff to the apartment, we decided to head east to see the most eastern part of United States. This suited wel with my earlier travels 05/2013, when I spent an hour lying on my stomach in the westernmost part of the Europe (Bjargtangar, Iceland). This time I didn't lie flat on the ground, just lost my sunglasses there while talking with the locals :)..

 at Bjargtangar fulfilling my lifelong dream of photograph puffins

The statue on the easternmost part of the US 

There was a huge monument on the point Udall as they call it, but you could go even more to the east if you jumped over the fence - and that is what we did, of course!

The easternmost corner of the US

The future image of stnz' gay date ad ;)

The views there were lot better, and there were huge sea birds flying around. I almost forgot the whole easternmost point while I was looking at the birds... The trail to the point was full with thorny plants, so it wasn't easy to get there - it literally took blood, sweat and tears to reach the point.

After admiring the views and the birds for a while, we got back to the car and went to snorkeling in nearby park area. Locals were having some awesome parties there, one of which was a birthday party - I can admit I was a little jealous.

I haven't freedived in years, so I've forgotten all about it, and my times under the water really suck (around 15s). Carlito send me some PDFs considering breathing techniques to further develop my skill as a diver, and I flipped through them quickly earlier and tried a few tricks - in first try I could stay under 28s :). I need to practice this back in Finland, annoying that you cannot use your fins when you're in a pool, if it isn't a specially reserved time for divers and free divers so it has to wait until it gets warm..

After we swam and snorkeled for a while, we returned to Christiansted and went for a walk in the town.
As a photographer I saw a lot of cool buildings and ruins right in the town centre. If it would've been safer, I would've taken my DSLR and tripod with me and do some real night time photography. Now I just had to use my little Lumix on handheld, so the quality of the images isn't really awesome.

As someone from the mainland said earlier "The whole Virgin Islands is for sale", you could really see it here. Everywhere were for sale-signs and the town centre was almost empty. The hotels were pretty full, but you didn't see much of the tourists, because most of them stay and do their things in the resorts, so in many cases we were the only "outsiders" visible..

BTW - The placement of the moon here is completely wrong. You have to look straight up to see the moon - at home, it's somewhere more neck-friendly position over the horizon.

After walking a while and seeing some 1,5m long fishes at the dock we ended up in a bar where was live music playing. Halen drank some really potent gintonic and rumcola, while me and stnz drank our colas like we usually do.

Outside the place there were couple of trees where bats were flying, and I moved myself to watch them hunt. They are such beautiful and fascinating creatures, I would've stayed there watching them for hours if I could.

We walked back to our apartment for a good night sleep (except halen, who didn't want to sleep in a queen sized bed with stnz and slept on a very hard surface on the couch instead of it)..

BTW - they drive on the left side of the road here and the steering wheel still on the left side of the cars. And the lights of the cars aren't aligned right, so every passing car will blind you at night.. Weird. Really weird.

Day 2 in San Juan: The day of Fails and a successful mission in Vieques

Date: 07.03.2014

Welcome to the Failboat, this is your captain speaking.

Today, things didn't really go as they were planned. Or well, I started with the fail theme last night by deleting all my beautiful night photos I took at the beach without uploading them to my computer. Time well spent. But well, things happen, it's a first time for everything and failing usually is a one time thing and I really do learn form my mistakes. To be honest, I was most bummed about the fact I managed to delete images of gecko tracks on the sand. They were adorable, as those little lizards are. I really love them and I want to have those :).

First fail for the day was me retrieving my towel from outside and heading to the shower. I managed to drop my phone from 10cm above the ground and break the display in a way that the touch feature didn't work at all anymore. Awesome! I had to go and buy a new phone after we got back from flying..

No crying over spilled milk, and it was time to head to the Isla Grande Flying School; we had scheduled a flight to Vieques from 9am with a local pilot instructor Jay. For some kind of insurance reasons stnz couldn't be piloting the plane alone, and he needed one of the local instructors to come with us for the trip.

We took of in good weather and arrived to Vieques on time. I ordered a cab to pick us up from the airport to move our asses to Esperanza, where we'd eat some lunch and I'd collect some sand for my little project at home I called the taxi and they promised that there would be one in 20 minutes. "Surprisingly" the taxi wasn't there in 25, and we were in a tight schedule. Luckily for us, when I was calling to hurry up the taxi (it was somewhere in Esperanza and 'running late' again) a minibus drove by. I managed to get it for us and we could go to Esperanza.

The Mosquito Pier seen above from the sky

Yeah, it's dead, Jim

Sand and sea at Esperanza, Vieques

Our hired gun, Jay, taking my usual seat as the map techinician

This was the second time for Jay in Vieques and he seemed to be pretty happy to get paid visiting the island with us :D. In Esperanza we ended up to Belly Button's to eat and drinking something. While we waited for our food, I went to the beach and got my sand sample. The guys were all laughing that it was "the world's most expensive sand ever" because it took a small aircraft and hired second pilot to get it :D

When we had eaten our lunches, we headed back to the airport and left back to San Juan.

Isla de Culebra

It's raining in El Yungue

Another Cessna going right underneath us

Flamenco Beach, ranked one of the most beautiful beaches in the world

We needed to go to the airport Avis to get extension for our car, because for some reason they didn't want to give it to us by the phone. It was a pretty quick trip not counting the minutes we were lost again in San Juan - Oh Boy the streets there are overwhelming at sometimes, with multiple lanes and lack of street names.. After that it was time to go and get me a new cellphone from a Radioshack.

Yes, stnz was here, and yes, stnz draw  his trademark walrus there :D

After we got back to the apartment, stnz and I decided to go swimming. First we both were there without anything expensive, but stnz decided to go back to the apartment and get his mobile phone. I noticed one guy was looking at us all the time under a palm tree, and when we went back to the water to rinse off all the sand, we noticed that stnz's phone was gone. Phoning to his customer and taking pictures with it, was enough to get the thief's attention. Fortunately it was an old Lumia which had some issues, and stnz managed to lock the phone when we got back to the apartment.

If this wasn't fail enough for one day, while I was in the shower I noticed I started to see some lines in my sight.. yes, I had a migraine coming. I ate as much painkillers I could get my hands on to in the apartment and started sleeping while the guys were in the Radioshack. When they got back, it didn't really take them a long time to notice that I was really out of it.

For that reason, the whole evening went while I was sleeping through the pain. After our fails, I'm still amazed we survived the flight and I'm still able to write this blog post :D.