Staring in the face of a storm…

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Marybeth and I are in the Dominican Republic this week! (I know, it’s hard to keep track of where we are!) And you might have heard, we have another special visitor approaching from the southeast… Tropical Storm Emily. I’m not one to let a little bad weather bring me down but since we were supposed to be SCUBA diving the whole week to perform a Reef Check on some of the reefs that noone had really dived on much before, the timing is a little disappointing. The waves yesterday were already tortuous for me and my poor stomach, and our fate today has yet to be decided, but I just keep telling myself that science isn’t always pretty and glamourous, and sometime you have to roll with the punches. And the waves.

Storm or no storm though, all is not lost.  Our work here in the Dominican Republic is just beginning. I have already met some ammmaaaazzzzing people here who all are really excited about the ecotourism possibilities in the area (which not only brings an income in for the locals, but also pulls the economic focus of the area off of unsustainable fishing practices).  I think there are some awesome prospects here! Watch out Punta Cana!

Preparing for Rainforest Camp

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This coming Monday is the start of our 5th annual Rainforest Camp in St. Lucia! We will be camping overnight for a week in the rainforest area near Micoud, St. Lucia with about 50 kids, from 11 to 15 years of age! And on behalf of Mary Beth, our good friend Brendan and all the other counselors, can I just say… YIKES! Haha! Actually, we are all really really excited… There is something so amazingly fun about being out in nature without cell phone signal and electricity, under the stars and out with all the whistling frogs, tarantulas and oooohhh the beautiful St. Lucian parrots that fly over in the morning… We drink cocoa tea (like a spiced hot chocolate) and eat bakes (a kind of fried or grilled dough thing), salt fish, green figs and bread fruit, all so lovingly prepared by our head chef Mr. Mathurin and his team of whichever group of campers we’ve assigned to that particular meal. The camp is, of course, focused on a particular environmental topic – this year, due to the large impact of Hurricane Tomas in November, we will focus on reforestation and it’s role in water quality.  We went shopping for supplies today and even had a little pre-camp fun with some of our kids from the Marigot Bay community while planning, water testing, jumping off of rocks and snorkeling.

Although it’s not easy to say how well camp will go, I am so extremely excited and optimistic about our plans for the next week! But ask me how much I like Rainforest Camp next Saturday… my opinion may completely change!

Testing all that needs to be tested….

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So here is the new website……and it’s in WordPress.

If you notice the URL is https://www.caribbean-sea.org. It’s been a long few months as we’ve migrated servers…email….applications and put all our “web” stuff in one spot. Email is back up and running (mostly) with a new gmail backend.

We’re also simultaneously tweeting and pushing the blog to Facebook. Please (look to your right) – Follow us!

Expect more to get posted….come back often…let us know if anything doesn’t work.