Today is our last day in paradise. Over the past couple of days Buzz and I have been going out at 6:30am to look for hermit crabs before we run the traps. We only caught one mongoose one day, but yesterday we caught five: three recaptures and two new ones. Buzz also took me to several other points on the island. I'll update this entry with pictures later.
We're catching hermit crabs to test Buzz's "birkenstock" hypothesis, which proposes that larger crabs have more time to look for shells that "fit" than smaller crabs. We measured the chela of about a hundred hermit crabs yesterday: one as large as your first and a dozen the size of kernel of corn. We put out some closed mongoose traps with fish in them in the place with the highest hermit crab density hoping to attract some more larger ones.
Today we'll pull all the traps in and start getting ready to leave. Lucy and I intend to visit the botanical garden first and then everyone is going to go out to help bring in the traps and then visit the "high energy" beach at the end of the point.
This morning, Lucy and I went to the Botanical Garden. It is built on an old sugar cane plantation and the plantings are done around the ruins. Some of the ruins have been reconstructed, but most are just foundations and walls. There was an old lime kiln where they converted seashells into lime to mix with molasses to make concrete. There was a small dam, flume, and cistern for fresh water. An old rum factory is where they keep the cactus collection.
Since before we came, we had heard about genips: a kind of fruit native to the Virgin Islands. Someone had given me a genip a couple of days after we arrived, but Lucy hadn't gotten to try one yet. She made me promise that I would find her one before we left. At the garden, we found a big genip tree. I checked the lowest branches to see if I could get a genip, but they were all too high. I checked around the ground to see if there were any undamaged enough to eat, but they mostly looked pretty bad. Then I saw two drop out of the tree. We tried those and then a gardener came up and asked if we wanted to try the genips. He had a long pruning device and lopped off a branch and let us stuff our pockets with genips.
Genips are kind of weird, but they're pretty good too. They don't have much flavor: a little sweet and a little sour, but not much else. They have a crisp rind that splits very easily, as if the fruit inside were under pressure. The interior pops out cleanly. The fruit is just a bit of gelatinous slime that surrounds the pit. You pop it into your mouth and suck the slime off the pit and spit it out. They're pretty addictive. Even the boys liked them.
After we got back from the botanical garden, Buzz and I took Alisa, Lucy and the boys out to the wildlife refuge where we've been trapping mongooses. They helped us bring in the traps and fold them up. We caught 4 mongooses: two recaptures and two new ones. While Buzz and I processed the mongooses, Alisa took the boys down to the beach and let them swim. The refuge probably has the best beach on the whole island. It's closed now for turtle nesting season, but will open for weekends in September.
This afternoon, we went over to Christiansted. Lucy and I toured the old fort. St. Croix was originally a French possession and the French had build a set of defensive earthworks. When the Danes bought St. Croix, they occupied the earthworks and, after they were damaged in a hurricane, they built a masonry fort on the same site. It's a classic star-shaped fort of the 18th century. It was never attacked. The most popular part is probably the dungeon, complete with a "black hole": a windowless section that they used for solitary confinement. It looked like it would have been really unpleasant to be held there. The powder magazine had some interesting features: it had 13 foot thick walls to protect it from naval bombardment. The doors and windows were fitted with bronze and copper hinges, which wouldn't spark. It had tiny windows, but they included a baffle installed in the middle of the wall, so that a saboteur couldn't throw something flaming into the magazine and take down the whole fort.
We're sad to be leaving, and dreading the long trip back tomorrow, but on the whole we're ready to be coming home. The boys are looking forward to seeing Penny and Plato.