Today is our last day of snorkeling! We leave tomorrow. 🙁

We need to end up anchored tonight at a spot close to the marina where we will be picked up to go to the airport tomorrow. So we stopped at 3 places to snorkel, before mooring in a bay at St. Thomas.

The Ledges snorkeling spot is at Little St James island – which was previously owned by the infamous Jeffrey Epstein. A view of it as we were arriving…

We went around the side to moor at a buoy near the rocks at the right side of this picture.

It was a nice place to snorkel. A lot of rocks jumbled around. There was some hard coral, but not much. However, there were a lot of fish to see.

This is a French Grunt. We see a good number of these yellow fish.

We’ve seen plenty of adult Queen Parrotfish, but this is a juvenile. It’s amazing how the colors are so different. Adults are very colorful!

Sometimes, Joran will jump in for a brief snorkel with us. This time, Casey also snorkeled. I have no idea how they don’t freeze in the water without any coverings besides bathing suits! Even with my rashguard top and bottoms, I wear a wetsuit vest to help be keep warm enough to stay in the water an hour. After that, I’m too cold to stay longer. Of course, they only snorkel about 20 minutes, so that is doable.

Here are two different Parrotfish. We see a lot of varieties of Parrotfish, both adult and juveniles.

Still more to add to this post…. I have to pause for my knee replacement surgery. Come back soon for these last couple of posts!!

OK! I’m back! I am still recovering from my knee replacement surgery, but I can stand for a bit of time at my computer.

We don’t usually see this interesting grey and yellow fish – it’s a Spanish Hogfish. Kind of a funny name!

This fish is some type of mackerel. I wasn’t quite sure which. It was a bit larger than the typical reef fish we see.

We snorkeled for about an hour or so at The Ledges, then Joran took us in the dinghy to a spot nearby. It was a small rock island. The snorkeling there was excellent! We ended up staying near the mooring ball, not swimming much towards the shoreline.

This is a neat picture showing an angelfish and the brightly colored orange coral with a pale purple sea fan. Although, the sea fan looks a bit pink in this lighting.

This was a beautiful Elkhorn Coral…. So wonderful to see this large specimen.

Very nice purple soft coral.

We do see these blue Tangs schooling quite frequently. They swarm an area and and pick it clean, then move along.

A nice picture of Jeff enjoying his snorkeling. It was a neat area with lots of coral growths, plus big rock formations. There was a lot of this type of coral growing all over these rocks.

There were also a lot of different types of soft corals in this area. The sponge on the left was very large. Really neat! We didn’t see much of either of these types in other areas.

Stragglers is definitely a nice snorkel spot! This shows the large rock formations, as well as the soft corals growing from them.

This was a cool place that had a lot of purple sea fans. Unfortunately, they don’t look as purple in this picture. There was surf breaking over the tops of these rocks, that’s the white area at the top of this picture (air bubbles). But I wanted you to see all the sea fans, even if this isn’t the best picture.

OH! I was following this stunning Queen Angelfish. It was pretty deep below me. And, it just wouldn’t stay out in the open for me to get a great picture. So, here are two pics… I liked how the fish was expanded to show it’s full shape in the right side picture. But the left lets you see its face.

This is a good view of the coral growing from the rocks. And there are two Yellowtail Damselfish above, with a number of those tiny yellow and black striped fish I still haven’t identified.

I have seen other sea urchins with things stuck to them, like this one. But I don’t know if they do that on purpose or if things just stick by accident. I did read that they use things for camouflage, but I’m not sure if that’s true.

It’s a bit hard to see, but there is a spotted fish in the middle of this picture, just at 11:00 above the spiny black sea urchin. It’s called a Trunkfish. I like this picture because it also shows the coral in the bottom left corner and the purple soft coral at the top left. Plus other corals around the picture.

Finally! The last pictures for Stragglers…. This a Pufferfish. What I thought was cool is that it changed colors to match where it was swimming. The left picture shows two of them. One is obvious over the sand, the other on the right side near the bottom corner, over the rocks. It’s harder to see because it’s multicolor is blending in with the rocks. The right picture is just the multicolored fish as he swam a bit off the rocks. I had watched him swim from the sand, where he was all one color to over the rocks, where he changed to the multicolors you see here. Pretty neat! These are fairly large Pufferfish.

We finished our great Stragglers snorkeling and moved on to our third snorkel spot for this day – Buck’s Island.