What a plane can provide

Friday morning was spent as vacation should be, relaxing and lounging around the boat with nothing to do.  It was the 1^st morning we all took a minute and relaxed.  Drew decided the night before that he wanted to make us “brunch”.  With skill, he whipped up a quick round of hot dogs, while Alex made sure that all the condiments were prepared and ready for us, as she served us up this great meal.

In the early afternoon, we decided to take the boat a couple of islands down to look at a plane wreck in the water and to possibly try some bottom fishing.  The seas on the bank side are still in no condition for bottom fishing, so we needed to find a protected place that fish would be congregating.  Essentially, we were looking for rocks or a string of coral heads.  We looked for dark spots or changing sea floor.  If we found a place, we would stop and have Russell jump in with his snorkel gear.  We surveyed a couple places, but really didn’t find anything, so we moved on to snorkel the plane wreck.

The plane wreck was amazing.  Probably the best wreck I have snorkeled or dove.  The structure above water was less than impressive, but the plane underwater was something to see.  The plane had gone down in the early 80’s after some kind of drug trafficking event.  The wings, engines, fuselage, and cockpit were deteriorated but still present. 

Best of all, under one of the wings was large schools of snapper.  When both Dan and I surfaced, we both looked at each other and said – “did you see the amount of fish down there?”  We laughed and moved away from the wreck to look for our “real” fishing location.  Well, none was found, so we returned back to the wreck, waited for another boat to leave too see if we could lure a couple of those snappers out and have them join us for dinner.

Dan jumped in the water and told us where to drop the bait.  He was chased out of the water by a 5-6 foot nurse shark that kept swimming towards him.  He had to hit the shark on the head with his fist and quickly jumped out of the water (lightening speed).  We realized later that the nurse shark was going to the drain of the boat that had “fish death” excreting out – and didn’t necessarily want Dan.

All 8 of us were on this adventure, all 8 of us were fishing, all 8 of us were catching.  The chaos in the boat for the next 1.5 hours was hilarious.  Lines in the water, lines needing rigging, fish being brought into the boat needing to be removed, kids with fishing poles, a dog barking and trying to bite all the fish that landed on the boat floor, and bait being flung all over Dan’s (Revil's) clean boat.  At the end, we came away with 36 nice size snapper which provided us fish tacos for dinner, Ceviche for appetizer, fish and potatoes (Cuban style) for the next night, and another fish dinner in the future. 

Russell, Vicky and I then spent last hours in daylight cleaning the fish.  Revil and Dan waited patiently to clean the boat (after sunset) and Kim made us a fantastic Ceviche.

All in all, it was a GREAT day in paradise.