THINK DOMINICA! I think I posted this travelogue-ish thing here before... We were only on Dominica for about a year but even if we had been there a lifetime, I do not think we would have seen all the wondrous and beautiful sites that are the island! Morning starts when the sun pops up over the ocean at 6:00 AM and as the morning goes on you watch over the mountains (volcanos) as the mist accumulates and clouds form and it dumps rain on you from about 2:00 to 4:00 PM. Everyday. There are no words to describe the beauty of the rainforests. It is hot and very humid but surprisingly not oppressive to climb through the undergrowth. Perhaps the excitement and the adrenaline kicking in? Hummingbirds abound. Everywhere. The Sisserou parrot, the nation's pride, is a majestic bird. They are THE MOST protected of Dominica's natural wonders. If one of a bonded pair of the parrots dies, the mate will cease to eat and soon will also die. The zoo there finds on occasion a lone bird mourning over a lost mate and capture it and try to feed them and get them to recover and find new mates. I saw one such male at the zoo but none in the wild. Go to the open air market (don't stand under a coconut palm) on Saturday and take your pick of ferns (I have no clue what they were), orchids, flowering this and flowering that. Most times the seller is not aware of the identity of what was being sold. There was a Rasta we befriended and he would save "plants of curiosity" for me. (Legal.All legal!) Plants generally will cost you up to $5.00 EC. You want to but a pig's tail for soup or a cow T-bone steak all the same price per pound...$2.50 EC. That is roughly $1.00 US. Go early for your shopping (6:30 - 7:00 AM) before the flies set in and on your soon to be groceries. Visit the old Brit. fort there and you can readily find cannon balls from early battles. Beaches near Portsmouth are black from the volcano. Storms bring up squid, sponges, sometimes fish on the beach. Go for a walk early (5:30-ish AM) and rescue these guys and toss them back into the sea. (Do not pick up red or orange sponges with bare hands.) Look out over the ocean and you may well catch a glimpse of whales, dolphins, or sea turtles doing their thing. You may even be asked for a dance by a Coconut Crab as he waves his claw at you and does the side step left and side step right. Mountain chicken (little frog legs) is an island delicacy. So is Ting, a carbonated grapefruit juice drink. They have Coke made from cane sugar rather than corn syrup. Delonix regia everywhere. Weedy little things. Wee seedlings sprouting like spring maple seedlings in Ohio. There is no rabies on the island. There are no poisonous snakes...but the snakes they do have are huge! So are their centipedes. I brought one back to the Ohio State University entomology dept. that was 11 inches long. (Yuck!) The people are delightful and will go out of their way like no one else to help you or do anything for you. You step out on the balcony in the morning to be greeted by the absolutely perfect rendition of Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik whistled by the neighbor as he has tea on his porch and watches the hummers at his BOP patch. You just haven't lived until you have ridden into town in the back of a pickup truck with three pigs! Night comes at 6:00 PM. Fade to black. Mosquitoes come out then so be sure you have your mosquito netting ready. Cholera and Dengue Fever are common. When dining at a restaurant, a word to the wise, look at the bread or rolls before eating them. There are very tiny ants that quickly move into baked goods such as bread, though the pastries they make seem safer. Electricity can be iffy at times...where ever you are. The favorite saying seems to be: The lights will go on when the generator is working. But who needs lights when you have a sky full of stars and a meteor shower every night. Oh how you wish you had the nerve to lie on the ground and just be drawn into the starscape but there are things creeping about at night: lizards, crabs, snakes, something like fire ants (or maybe they are a type of fire ant) those darn centipedes and don't even mention the spiders. They export bananas and fresh water. Much of the water goes to Antigua. If I could I would go back to Dominican a heartbeat. Oh, if traveling there try to get your prop plane to land at the Canefield Airport. The other airport is a blind approach over the volcano and more than a little scary. That's about it. St. Kitts is OK ... too touristy now though. C3D (Sorry for the poor quality of the photograph of the beach at Portsmouth. It is sadly the best one of our six Polaroid photographs, all now fading away, that have survived the hurricane.)

The limiting factors that determine the largest vessel and type of vessel are the depth of some of the canals and the height of the lowest fixed bridge that a boat must pass under. A safe maximum draft, which is how deep a boat sits in the water, is five feet, for saftey. Some of the canals have a minimum depth of 7 to 9 feet, under ideal conditions. The maximum height is under 19 feet above the water line, so as to get under safely a bridge in Chicago that is over one of the canals there. One of those canals that Chicago built to divert dumping sewage into the Great Lake. (history lesson) Heard rumours that a couple of college kids did it one year on jet skis. Bet they set a record time for quickest trip around the loop. Also, the trip during the northern part is strictly high summer, to take advantage of the short warm season there, when weather is calm. Also the larger the boat, the higher the overall cost of the trip. Big displacement boats require much more fuel to make the trip than a smaller boat that planes. For a trawler around ~45 feet, with adequately sized engines (plural) the estimated fuel cost for the trip with prices around $3/gallon is $6,000 for the trip. My boat, with a relatively moderate sized motor of 70 hp, will have an estimated fuel cost of less than $2,000. Also, the bigger boats cruise economically at about 15 mph, whilst at the same fuel consumption my boat will cruise at 30 mph. I'm doing my homework, to see if this is feasible anytime soon.

Yes. The yellow iris - which was supposed to be blue and descended from the blue flags of Mary Gardiner - is blooming right now. It is bearded. The bud starts out blue tipped then opens to yellow standards and blue striped yellow falls. Within a day or two the blue stripes turned brown and the yellow standards were not really clear yellow any more. We have had heat and rain so that may account for the dulling of the colors. The plant is robust and spreads rapidly. The flowers are 30"to 36" tall and smaller than those of today's. Meanwhile we have been in touch with Dr. Favretti and he says that we obviously have the wrong iris as his ARE blue. He has recently divided his, discarding the extras but has offered us another try after his present clump spreads enough for another divide.I expect to get in touch with him again to see if he knows the botanical name of the Gardiner Island iris and if he could send us a picture. We also tried to make contact with "the President's House" at Yale but got no response, and we have e-mailed the museum at Worden in Holland asking for information about corespondence of Mary Gardiner. Also no answer to date. So the hunt goes on. At least we now know that the yellow iris we have been cherishing as blue flag Gardiner Island is the wrong one and we may discard it. Gnomlet aka Marianne

Party, I so envy you the ability to kayak. It always looks like such a peaceful way to navigate the waters. I got to do it 9 years ago in Alaska. I got into the kayak ok, but getting out was such a challenge, I just can't do it. I was also nervous about the possibility of tipping over. But I'm glad you have such a fun way to see nature at its best.