These past couple of days have been filled with office work and short trips to the beach. We have just entered our long stretch of no boat days, which gives Taylor and I a great opportunity to get some photo sorting, video logs, and sighting sheets recorded and analyzed. On Thursday we began our day with a little bit of photo sorting and then headed over to Kel’s house to place a video call over to Marineland! We were happy to leave our little cottage because our cottage did not have power all morning. They needed to change the power box, so they had to shut off the power, which means our little home on Bimini got really hot, really quickly. We took the beautiful ocean view walk over to Kel’s where Taylor and I introduced ourselves to the students at Marineland and then Kel gave a full lecture about dolphin identification and why it is important. It was a lecture I remember hearing from last year, but I still enjoy listening to it and re-familiarizing myself with the photo identification materials.
After Taylor and I came back to the cottage, the power was still shut off because of the power box exchange. We decided to go down the street to CJ’s deli to get a bite to eat and sit by the beach. Hank said it would only be able 20 more minutes until the power was back on, so we decided to wait stretched out on the beach. After going swimming to cool off, we came back to our cottage but the power on the entire island was now off! Since our computers were low on battery and our cottage was now at a steamy 95 degrees, we decided to hit the beach again and do some snorkeling in our backyard. It was a nice snorkel around the rocks and Taylor and I say a cute little stingray that swam with us for a while. We relaxed on the beach for a while, and would periodically return to the cottage to see if the power returned, but we had no such luck. We decided to stay on the beach and continue to stay cool in the water, even if it meant having to constantly reapply all of our sunscreen. Soon, Kel arrived with kids in tow – they had the same idea, beating the heat by floating in the sea. It wasn’t until around 5:30 that Kel spied a nearby streetlight turn on: power was back! Taylor and I headed inside so we could try and get some more office work done since we had spent most of the day at the beach. We did some photo sorting and had leftover lasagna for dinner. It was one of our hottest days on Bimini with the power going out, but Taylor and I tough it out and still love our island life all the same.
Until next time! Cheers!
-Nat and Taylor
PS: Here’s a pic from our beach clean-up with Sacred Heart University – with all the dolphin sightings, we never posted it!