Tangent Time

Rented a 40 foot catamaran for my 50th birthday in Abacos, Bahamas. It was 4 days after hurricane Irene.

No one was there but us, we had the whole Caribbean to ourselves.

The day before a hurricane, is not the best time to be born.

Not if you’re a Sea Turtle anyway.

Here is what the ocean in Cocoa Beach looked like yesterday.

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Here is what it looks like today.

• Pay attention to the guys trying to paddle out, I think one of them may have drowned
• The girl on the boggy board took a beating like a ragdoll
• The Kite Boarder is pretty crazy

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The baby Sea Turtle at the end was a loner.

No brothers or sisters around, they all left without him. I had to drop the camera suddenly because 6 seagulls were getting ready to dive at him.

I know you are not supposed to intervene and handle them. Maybe nature says I should have let him be a snack, but I couldn’t do it. So I picked him up and waded out as far as I could to let him go.

But what if the only reason the seagulls saw him was because they saw me looking at him. Then I had to intervene. Good, now I feel OK about it.

I am supposed to go to Marsh Harbor, Abacos Bahamas, next Wednesday, to sail on a catamaran for a week for my 50th birthday. However some bitch name Irene is about to pounce right on top of where my boat is waiting for me.

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I guess it is a good thing I am not there NOW, that my vacation was planned for next week not this week.

Maybe there is something to that “timing is everything” cliché.

It is hard to visualize what 10 million looks like.

But I saw it this morning.

It is that time of year in Florida, the lovebugs are everywhere. Those pesky little, acid-rich, car paint-destroying, sex maniacs. For those of you who have not experienced it , we are swarmed down here in Florida twice a year in numbers so huge it is incomprehensible. They only live 3 – 4 days, but they maintain huge numbers for almost a month. When 10 million die another 10 million are born.

How many are there really? No one is sure.

Riding my bike on the beach this morning, there were an incredible amount of dead lovebugs painted in wave-like patterns on the beach sand,  left high on the beach from the ocean’s tide.

I rode my bike from Coconuts to the Jetty which is 7 miles. The wave of dead bugs ran the entire stretch of the beach and the concentration of bugs was pretty consistent the entire way.

So I stopped and counted them.

There were between 250 and 300 bugs for every 12 inches of beach.

275 bugs per foot X 5280 feet per mile X 7 miles =

10 Millions bugs.

How many lovebugs do you think there are in the entire state of Florida?

I guess it would suck if we lived only 3 – 4 days on average, so can you blame them for how they spend there time?