Our current digs...

One of the coolest things about Tortola is that no matter where you go, you'll always run into someone you know or who knows someone that you know. The saying 'its a small world' truly applies when you live on a 12 mile long island.

Everywhere you go you'll find people honking at you and waving or you'll find yourself standing in line at the grocery store with someone you met the week before. The bar was full of people we spent the day waiting in line with at the motor vehicle licensing place.

Another thing that is massively cool about living on Tortola is just the simple fact that you live on Tortola. It's a place where, to my knowledge, there are only two roads with actual names, no stop signs, no addresses, amazingly steep roads, lizards living in your apartment with you, tarantulas on your porch, goats and chickens in the road, fresh fruit falling from trees, colorful fish everywhere in the water, friendly people (but not too many), dozens of islands begging to be explored and within a few hours kayaking distance, a great school to be a part of and awesome weather.

This is where we currently live.

Bottom row on the right. Wayno lives next to us and two other Cedar teachers live above.

Out through the glass doors, through the pool, right onto the beach.

This place is deserted. Never more than a few people wandering around.

Snorkeling off into the sunset.

Some creatures. A blue tang, some yellow grunts and a wrass in the background. And some orbs.

Stace racing away in a slowly sinking kayak. She took it out and returned to the beach with at least 400lbs of water that had seeped through a crack in the hull. There was no hauling it up on shore. We had to take out some plugs and let it drain before it even budged.

Guana Island from the water.

Stace and I went snorkeling two evenings ago northeast along the beach. For about 200 yards of shoreline we swam through an immense shoal of tiny fish. Diving down, the shoal was stratified with smaller fish at the top, medium fish in the middle and the larger fish near the bottom, each size was a different species. To the ocean side of the shoal there were larger predatory fish like tarpon, mackerel, jacks and barracuda harassing the edge. Birds dive bombed from the air and torpedoed through the water and emerged with mouthfuls. They couldn't miss if they tried. The shoal was so thick in places that even in the crystal clear water the bottom, 6ft away, was completely invisible. In certain places you lost all points of reference and everywhere you looked there were just shimmering fish. It was the largest amount of anything I have ever seen and I feel like I now have something to mentally reference when I hear numbers like a billion.