After the Coral Gardens, we moved on to Eustatia Island. It was a pretty little island location with hardly any other boats moored.

First, we had a delicious lunch of salmon over a quinoa salad with lots of hidden treasures buried in the salad.

After lunch, we jumped in to snorkel. This must have been a wonderful place to snorkel before the coral died from both bleaching and hurricanes. There was just so much dead coral. There were still a lot of fish hanging around the area, though. Even when dead, the coral provides good hiding places for many fish.

Here, you can see the beauty of the soft coral “trees” growing on the mostly dead coral. Some small amount of the coral is still alive (the pale yellow patch), but it will take a long time to grow back as it was (assuming it can).

This little guy – a Yellowtail Snapper – was hovering over a bunch of broken dead coral.

We saw some fun things besides fish on this snorkel. Check this out – there is an arm of something coming out of this shell Jeff is holding! I assume it’s a Conch sea snail in there.

Later, Jeff saw this crab peeking out from an abandoned Conch shell.

And, we saw a Stingray! He looked so cool gliding over the sandy bottom.

The only gross part of this snorkel was the large amount of sargassum seaweed. Yuck!! We tried to swim around the biggest patch of it, but couldn’t avoid all of it. We ended up having to swim through it. That just grossed me out! The largest patch was so dense and large that it cut off all the sunshine, so it was really dark and eerie below it. We couldn’t get a good picture of that since it was just very dark.

This was the only place we swam that had large patches of Sargassum. While sailing between sites, we did see patches of Sargassum floating around, so they’ll eventually end up on some beaches. I think we just got lucky for this trip.

For dinner this evening, Casey made a lamb shank with sweet potatoes and Brussels sprouts. She makes every plate of food look SO pretty – plating them like we are in a fancy restaurant!

Tomorrow, we’ll move on to snorkel at Diamond Reef.