Fisherman

—You’ll not find bright fish in a drying riverbed where exposed stones lie stacked together like loaves of bread, but you can dance handsomely across the stones.

—A black fish in a clear pool requires a cautious approach.

—A clear fish in a black pool should not be approached at all.

—A fisherman without fish remains a fisherman.

—Trout are magic.

—Mitchell Hegman

Eleven Lemons

I recall the California sun.  Uyen and I were visiting Helen and Gary in Redwood City.

All four of us alive then.

Helen and Gary lived in a fine rented house with a small green yard.  But an important yard—one that cradled sunlight and held in its center a lemon tree.

I went out and stood by the lemon tree so I might accurately count the lemons hanging from the branches.

Eleven.

Eleven fat lemons.

Nearby, a bird sang “weep-weep, two-two.”    

I poked at a lemon on the tree.

Earlier, Helen told me she’d been having problems with ants.  Argentine ants, which, instead of bringing us a new dirty dance, march inside our homes and make a mess.

I always wanted a lemon tree, and I thought Helen was lucky to have one.

Little did I know that in less than two years, Gary would be gone.

In five, so, too, the woman who made all her life and much of mine possible.  

—Mitchell Hegman

Atomic Matter

We could be wrong about everything.

Perhaps what we call “atomic matter” is neither particles nor strings of energy (as assumed in String Theory).

Maybe matter is made up of little more than a compilation of bad jokes and we are the one-line punch:

BADA-BING!

And then the universe goes on to embrace the next light or dark thing.

—Mitchell Hegman

Blue Waters

Home again.

Today, I am posting a few photographs from our excursion to Grand Cayman’s Stingray City two days ago.  That excursion, and three associated snorkeling stops at points along the North Sound barrier reef, were the most amazing adventures I have experienced in ocean waters.

So much to take in.

All the colorful fish.  An entire underwater seascape featured in wavering blue light.  White sands.  Purple sea fans.  Staghorn coral.  Brain coral.  Columns of light probing the living seas and blue waters.

Me with stingrays and jack fish
(photo thanks to Lindsey)

Our group surrounded by stingrays

Conch (caught and released again)

Our full group at the mangroves

—Mitchell Hegman

Stingray City

The most popular tourist attraction on Grand Cayman (and maybe in all the Caribbean) is a place called Stingray City.  The “city” is really a brace of white sandbars located about a mile offshore in North Sound.  One sandbar (Sting Valley) eases itself into blue depths and is famous for diving.  The other sandbar is quite shallow, with water depths ranging between two and four feet.

Historically, fisherman returning from beyond the protective reef leading into North Sound cleaned their fish in the calm waters at the sandbars.  Naturally, the fish entrails and squid thrown overboard attracted stingrays.  The stingrays quickly developed a habit of gathering at the sandbars anytime they heard a boat engine, expecting an easy meal.

Once somebody realized the stingrays were not opposed to being fed by hand, an entire tourist industry was born.

Today, excursion boats carry pale-bodied tourists out into the sound and drop them into chest-high water, often with food in hand (squid, etc.) for feeding the stingrays.  The stingrays are quite friendly, if not downright puppy-like.  They will quickly gather around anyone dropped in the shallow blue waters.

We will be taking a boat to Stingray City early this morning.  We were scheduled to visit Stingray City two days ago, but our selected guide company had mechanical troubles with their boat.  This tour is pushing our schedule pretty hard—as we will by flying for home on an early morning flight tomorrow.

I have posted a YouTube video of Stingray City this morning.  Hopefully, I can post my own photographs tomorrow before we leave for snowy Montana.

—Mitchell Hegman

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UIGnpKi51c 

Island Dream

I don’t know if there is even a single paint store on Grand Cayman, but in my dream last night there were many.  More interestingly, I was with actor and singer Dean Martin.

Never mind that Dean has been gone for over twenty years.

Dean and I kept going from paint store to paint store on the island.  He was mad because everyone in the stores recognized him and none of the stores carried white paint.

I woke exiting the last store we visited.

Posted today (because why not) is a photograph of sunset at our beach last.

—Mitchell Hegman

Out of Place

I suffered a vicious attack yesterday.

Okay.  Maybe not all that vicious.  And maybe attack is far too strong a word.

The whole event started when Kim, Lindsey, and I sat talking inside our beachside villa.  At that time, I happened to catch something of an odd movement on the elevated pool deck just outside the nearest window.   There, I thought I saw a fallen leaf very slowly skitching across the tiles, but moving in the exact opposite direction from which the wind was blowing.

Odd.

I looked a bit closer.  “I think there is a hermit crab out there by the pool,” I said to the girls.

I left the girls and stepped outside to investigate.   Sure enough, once I reached the deck I found a hermit crab laboriously clunking across the tiles.

“How in the heck did you get up here?” I asked the crab.  Our pool is completely elevated on a deck that is easily two feet above the sandy white beach in front of it.

The crab answered by vanishing away inside his shell with one final clunk.

“Well, I would say you are bit out of place here,” I told the crab.  With that, I picked him (her?) up by the shell for an expedited trip back to the beach.

That’s when the attack occurred.

Again, not so much an attack as a pinching tickle.  Maybe more like a crab feel-me-up.  And, by the way, hermit crabs have in inordinate number of legs—ten if you really do some close counting.

Even given the hermit crab’s resistance, I managed to carry the thing back to the beach for safe release under a coconut tree.

Fortunately, I had the foresight to document the entire event with my smarter-than-me-phone so I can share a few images of that here today.

—Mitchell Hegman

Offshore Banking

The Cayman Islands are among of the richest islands in all the world.  The business of Grand Cayman is not really tourism, mind you.  It’s “offshore” banking.

Read “tax haven” here.

Another term used on the Islands is “asset protection.”  If you poke about looking into getting yourself a bank account here, you might find the following reasons listed for protecting your assets: business or partner lawsuits, personal lawsuit, divorce, unfair or unlawful creditors.

You are welcome to make unlawful creditors apply as broadly as required for your needs.  

And finding a bank on Grand Cayman is like fishing in a bucket.  More like fishing in a bucket that hands the fish to you when you get anywhere near it.  This tiny island is home to nearly 150 banks.  40 of the world’s top 50 banks hold licenses in Cayman.  Of those banks, only six are retail banks—banks where locals go for day to day banking transactions.  Five banks are category A banks, which can operate in both domestic and international markets.  The rest of the banks—the vast majority—are category B banks, which are permitted to conduct business with non-residents and only specially licensed local entities.

There is a lot of fancy footwork going on here.  Stuff we refer to as “investment banking.”  I don’t know much about that sort of thing…other than these folks tanked our economy a few year back.  Enfolded into all this investment banking are more than 10,000 hedge funds and hordes of insurance companies.

At this point, we need to recall a certain John Ralston Saul who said about bankers: “Bankers - pillars of society who are going to hell if there is a God and He has been accurately quoted.”

Offshore incorporation is also big on the Cayman Islands.  Somewhere in the vicinity of 100,000 corporations have their roots in the Cayman Islands.  We are not talking Mike’s Handyman Shop, Incorporated here. We are talking bigger.  Much bigger.  One five-story office building in George Town, the Ugland House, is the official address for nearly 20 thousand companies.  Something near 150 of these companies are from the U.S.  Coca-Cola, and Intel can be counted among those.

Here is a good trick.  An American company, should they want to make money without paying taxes, can funnel monies through a “holding” company or a “subsidiary” registered in the Caymans (read “shell” company here).  In either case, these Cayman Island companies are really nothing more than vehicles for pushing money protected places.

I will admit, have been on the island for over a week now, Grand Cayman is pretty laidback protected place…if only I had the money to get through the proper bank doors.

—Mitchell Hegman

Bioluminescence

If you are someone who regards skinny dipping at night a safe practice because other skinny-dippers around you cannot see your tender nakedness in low light, skinny dipping in the waters off our Grand Cayman dock may not be advised.

The water here is conspiring against you.

There is a good possibility the water may light up and expose you the instant you splash into the ocean.  It’s not the water itself, mind you.  The water is brightened by light emitting life: plankton in this case.  Something called bioluminescence.

Plankton, by definition are small to microscopic organisms in the water.  They might be anything (and everything) from diatoms and protozoans (single-celled lifeforms) to small crustaceans and the larvae of larger animals.  In our bay—which is known as Bio Bay around the island—a high concentration of dinoflagellates are present.  Dinoflagellates are another single-celled form of life.  They are something of a whirling algae.  Ours produce light in a chemical reaction when disturbed.       

At night, in our bay, the water lights up and glows a Wedgewood blue when you swish or splash anything in it thanks to high concentrations of these plankton.

Last night, with the moon stuffed away deep inside a laundry pile of clouds, the bioluminescence was on full display in the water off our dock.  Several of our group went out to the dock in the darkness and swished oars in the seawater, creating glowing blue swirls.

I read, somewhere, that only twelve or so places in the world exist where concentrations of the plankton is great enough to cause such displays.  In that regard, we are lucky to witness this.  I have posted a photo of a bioluminescent display from Bio Bay I found on the internet.  That is followed by a video I tried to capture last night.

We got a pretty good laugh from the video, actually.  A funny failure with my voice attached…

   

Bioluminescence (PHOTO: Cayman Catamaran Charter)

My failed video                                                                       

—Mitchell Hegman

Coconut Water

Marcus is cool.  Island cool.  He carries himself with a certain grace most men cannot afford.  He speaks in an easy and unhurried tone and always knows exactly what he is going to say before he says it.

Marcus is a swimming pool contractor by trade and he also performs maintenance on the pool at our rented house.  He stopped by the other morning to check on our pool—this just as Larry and Bill were putting the pool skimmer back together, having discovered the circulating line intentionally blocked with a plastic bag.   Larry, only a few minutes earlier, had cleaned a developing ring of grime from around the pool’s waterline.

“I’ve already scrubbed the ring from around the pool,” Larry teased Marcus.

Marcus smiled.  “Thank you.  Thank you so much.”

Larry and Bill then asked him about the skimmer.  They asked specifically if the circulation pipe was intentionally blocked.

“Yes, yes,” Marcus said.  “Some of the island contractors are not so good.  They put in all of the fill around the pool all at once instead of one foot at a time and compacting.”  He held his hand and measured an invisible foot in the air.  “This is what happened here.  A pipe is broken underground.  The earth settled and broke the line.  If we allow the water to circulate all the time, the water from the pool leaks out.”

Pretty soon, we more or less surrounded Marcus.  Everyone had a question and Marcus seemed to know answers:

How do you build the docks using PVC pipe driven into the sand?  What creature builds the mounds in the sand on the floor of the ocean off are dock?  When is the best time to see bioluminescence in the water?  How do you know if a coconut in the tree is ripe?

“When the coconut is big, it is ripe,” said Marcus, “And the water in the coconut is the only good water.  Only coconut water is pure.  If you drink the water from the coconut it will clean your heart.  Only coconut water will do this.” He paused for a spell to let this sink in to all of us.  “Let me get my machete from the truck.  I will show you.”

Marcus knocked a pair of large green coconuts from one of the trees on our beach with the extended handle of his pool skimming net.  He then walked out to his truck, retrieved his machete and returned to the beach.  “We will drink the coconut water.  You will see.”

We all stood watching as Marcus whacked open the end of the coconut with his machete, exposing a fairly small mouth.  He handed the coconut to Larry. “Drink from the coconut.”

Larry took a drink and then passed the coconut on so each of us could take a drink.

“This will clear your heart.  This is the only water to do so.”

Larry passed the coconut on.  Each of us took a drink so we could have a clean island heart.

Whether we have clean hearts or not…I don’t know.  I liked the taste. 

And Marcus is cool, that much is certain.

Marcus retrieving a coconut

Whacking open a coconut

Larry drinking fresh coconut water

—Mitchell Hegman

The Cali (Swimming with Tarpon)

The Cali, a 220 foot steel schooner, was built in 1900 as a four-masted sailing ship.  In 1926, she was fitted with two giant diesel engines.  The ship spent the next 22 years transporting freight across the oceans.  Then, in January of 1948, the Cali began taking on water.  She ran ashore at George Town with a cargo of 30,000 bags of rice. 

Today, you will find the wreckage of the Cali in 20 to 30 feet of water about 40 yards offshore along Grand Cayman’s North Church Road.  The ship lies as a dark mass amid a seascape of wave-sculpted white sand and roving schools of showy fish.

Interestingly enough, one of the best access points for snorkeling the Cali is from the outside eating deck at Rackam’s Waterfront Restaurant and Bar.   Rackam’s not only allows you to snorkel from their deck, they encourage it.  They have even provided a ladder for accessing the water from the sea wall of the establishment.

The ocean waters immediately below Rackam’s deck teem with a variety of fish—including French-fry-eating tarpon.

The other day, all six of us ate lunch at Rackam’s.  After pitching the last of our fries into the water for the Tarpon, I, Bill, and Larry slipped into the aquamarine water alongside three and four-foot tarpon.  The tarpon were not at all opposed to swimming with us.  A variety of other smaller and more colorful fish (I am still in the process of learning names) also swirled around us.

We soon swam away—over something of an underwater escarpment of sand and then into water turning deeper and darker.  At the edge of the darker water, Bill and I saw one giant fish, fat and bulky as an anvil (but much bigger), lurking along a white sand incline.  There, we also found the collapsed heap of the Cali spread across the sand below us.  At one point, we even found divers swimming and bubbling below us.

To date, this was my favorite snorkel adventure on the island.

The photograph of the ladder I am posting today will give some indication of the size of the tarpon swimming the waters around Rackam’s.

Tarpon

Tarpon below the ladder at Rackam’s

Me at the end of visiting the Cali

Short Cali Video from YouTube

—Mitchell Hegman

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5QKqOLarqs

Sea Turtles (Cayman Turtle Centre)

Fasten your seat belts.  We are in for a bit of a bumpy ride.  For starters, we are going to unapologetically spell center as “centre” since we are presently in an English Territory.  Secondly, we are going to talk a bit about killing and eating sea turtles.

The history of the Cayman Islands is very much a history about sea turtles as well.  Christopher Columbus, when he found the two smaller islands in 1503, originally named the islands “Las Tortugas” (Tortuga being the Spanish word for turtle).  The islands and surrounding reefs supported extraordinary populations of sea turtles. 

Word of the islands quickly made way round the seafaring world.  The islands soon became a regular stop-over for sailing ships seeking provisions.

By provisions, I mean (mostly) turtle meat.                                  

Turtles were something of a perfect food item on a long voyage.  They were easy to catch, and they were also easy to keep alive onboard ships as a source of fresh meat.  The turtles could even survive long periods of time helplessly stranded on their backs. 

By the 1800s, however, most of the Cayman turtle population was depleted.  The “turtling industry” that had developed around the islands was forced to seek turtles in other locations.

Cayman Turtle Centre was established in 1968 by a group of private investors.  The intent of the centre was that of raising green sea turtles for “commercial use” (read “eating them” here).

I cannot find myself being at all judgmental about this.  The whole idea was to assure that wild populations would not be further depleted by those still seeking sea turtles for dinner.  Furthermore, a great deal of valuable research has been a result of the centre’s work.  Today, in fact, the center is working with a second generation of breading turtles produced in domestication.

Regulations fashioned by the U. S. and other countries to protect sea turtles soon blocked commercial turtle sales and the centre’s commercial turtle operation went bankrupt in 1975.  At that time, some 100,000 turtles were being fed at the centre.       

Following the collapse of the original company operating the turtle centre, both private investors and the Cayman Island Government have been involved in keeping the centre open.  The centre weathered Hurricane Michelle in 2001 and Hurricane Ivan in 2004 at great cost.  A local we talked with told us that Hurricane Ivan was such that it even destroyed the coral reef just offshore from her home.

Today, Cayman Turtle Centre still serves the dual purpose of raising turtles for meat and for release into the ocean.  To date, some 31 thousand partially-grown turtles have been safely released into the ocean by the centre.

While the centre has been criticized for, among other issues, holding captive in small spaces, animals that might migrate for hundreds or thousands of miles in the wild, a lot of good has come from the centre’s long-term operation.

Yesterday, the group of us visited the centre.  Though raised in the high, mountainous West of the United States, we all feel a mighty affection for the sea turtles.

For us, eating one is out of the question.

A pair of immature turtles

Mature green sea turtle

                         Turtles and Montanans

Sunset at our private beach

—Mitchell Hegman

Cayman Crystal Caves

Cayman Crystal Caves are (at the same time) among the oldest and newest of island attractions.

They are among the oldest by way of having been formed over millions of years—as are all limestone formations—by accumulation of fossilized sea creatures on an ancient sea floor.  At some point, in somewhat more recent history, these limestone deposits became the top of a mountain thrust up above sea level.  Subsequent erosion formed chambers in the limestone and then rainwaters began to trickle down through the chambers leaving calcium deposits in the form of stalactite and stalagmite formations.

These cave are still wet and very much alive (insomuch as a cave can be alive).  In many places, the formations are still dripping and adding an inch or two of growth every 100 or 200 years. 

The caves are among the newest attractions because public access to the caves was provided only 5 years ago.  Building ingress roads, forest floor pathways, clearing cave entrances, and installing infrastructure (including lighting) took 4 years of intense but careful work by about a dozen or so people.

The caves are located in a dense tropical forest only a bit over ten minutes from our villa.  We drove to the caves yesterday and took a guided 1½-hour tour.  Everyone in our group enjoyed the tour—though some chambers within the caves can be quite warm and humid.

Tree Frog (found along a path)

Cave Entrance

The Water Cave

Chris and Larry

Me and That Girl

—Mitchell Hegman