Last Days in Bermuda

Monday July 7, 2014

I’m going to kill my camera.  I really am.  Even though I’m the one I should be mad at since I’m sure it’s 100% my fault for not knowing how to work it properly.  First of all, ever since I got my new Sony NEX-5T back in Miami, I’ve been having issues where I need an update that I can’t get on Photoshop for it to read my RAW images.  So ever since our first stop in Bimini, I’ve been using JPEG photos on the site.  Not my number one wish, but whatever, it works for now.  At least I shoot in both and still have RAW images saved so I can go back to them later if I want.

The kicker for me is that last night we heard a celebration going on in the town square of St. George, so we went to check it out.  Bringing my camera in, and shooting in RAW and JPEG, I took some great photos, knowing that I’d be using the JPEGs to go up on the site.  Now I go back to them and get this error message: ‘Photo viewer doesn’t support this file format, or you don’t have the latest updates to Photo Viewer’.*  Come on!  It’s not like I have the easiest access to a good internet connection these dates to get those updates!  So, at the moment, I’ve had to go waaaay outside the box, taking screen shots of my RAW photos that I can only view on my computer but do nothing else with, paste them to Paint, save as JPEG, and then I can worth with them to edit or upload to the site.  Geez.  I really need to get my s#!t together and figure out this problem once and for all.

But..other than my issues with the camera, everything has been great here.  As I was mentioning, we went into the square last night when we heard a live band playing and wanted to see what the celebration was for.  Since a crowd was gathering around the yacht club we wandered over there as well and found the floor of the office decorated with intricate flower patterns and statues of Jesus placed here in there.  Then I remembered that when we had been walking around earlier we’d seen a procession of kids all dressed up, and thinking back to the elementary aged girls in their frilly white dresses, I put two and two together.  This must be an annual celebration for First Communion.

With all the church related stuff done for the day it was now time for everyone to party, and they were going all out.  In the center of the square was a large stage with a band playing, what had originally drawn us in.  It was a group of about five men playing covers of songs from the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s, and they were pretty good.  In front of the information center was a long tent with tables selling all kinds of food.  We had actually been up for buying something for once but found out we got to the party just a little too late and all the good stuff was sold out.  We could still buy beer or other drinks, but I had already packed a single serve wine in my purse to bring to the event with me.  Tee hee, my parents have taught me well.

When the music finished it was time to raffle off a Vespa, and Matt and I were caught quite off guard when the gentleman on stage began speaking in something that was definitely not English.  It was something that neither of us were familiar with, and after trying to pick out familiar sounding words here and there we finally gave up and asked a family who was sitting on the curb behind us, and they told us it was Portuguese.  Wow, it sounds a lot different than I expected it to.  Lots more shhhh sounds.  I always thought it would sound very French.  But it looks like something we’d better prepare ourselves for since the Azores are part of Portugal and we can foresee a lot more of it in the future.

 Although we originally planned on getting our butts in gear and leaving today, the weather was showing no kind of wind whatsoever.  So instead of bobbing around 10 miles outside of Bermuda waiting for it to fill in, we decided to do it comfortably at anchor.  Which also meant we had one more day on our hands to go have fun.  Wanting to enjoy Tobacco Bay once more, sitting out and enjoying the sun and water, we packed another bag today as well as our snorkel gear and made our way out there.

We had barley put our bags down on one of the flat black rocks surrounding the bay before we were grabbing out our snorkeling gear and getting into the water.  We hadn’t expected to see much in these waters, but even as soon as we got in there were a bunch of hand sized white fish with black dots on their tail that are hard to see unless you’re in the water because they blend in with the sand.  Wanting to see more though, we kicked between some of the rocks and out of the protected little bay into open water.  Although we hadn’t been expecting much in these areas either, we were pleasantly surprised to find an abundance of tropical fish out here, probably better than most of the areas we’d snorkeled in the Bahamas this year (with the exception of Bimini).

Staying close to the tall rocks, as that’s where any of these fish seemed to be, I could tell we were both silently cursing ourselves for not breaking our pole spear, although I’m not entirely sure if that’s allowed here.  I was having a great time out in the water, having not really enjoyed it for about two months now.  As I was thinking to myself, ‘This is absolutely perfect, and the best part is, there’s no barracuda lurking behind me’, I turned my head just in time to see, yup, a big ‘ol barracuda staring me down.  Damn it!, we can never seem to escape those things!

It wasn’t much longer after that when we swam back into the safety of the bay and I lost Matt for a bit when I became entranced watching a parrot fish that was almost as big as me.  When I did find him again he was skirting an area just below one of the tall rocks that people were jumping into the bay from.  Getting back to our spot on the rocks we had another lunch and relaxed a little before packing it in for the day.  Well Bermuda, you’ve been really good to us.  I think we’re going to miss you, unintentional stop.

*I just realized the issue of why I couldn’t get the photos from last night to come up in JPEG.  Because of my memory card swap, since my normal one stopped working in Hamilton, I had different photos with the same number when they uploaded.  The RAWs uploaded fine, but when the second set of JPEGs uploaded with the same number, it wiped out the first set.  At least that’s one issue figured out.