Jolly Pirates snorkel tour
Here is the excerpt from my day with Jolly Pirates:
In retrospect, the tour gets a 10!! 
December 6th Aruba St. Nicholas day
Here we are in Aruba again on the same day as we visited last year. This year I decided to take an extended snorkel as my days were limited on islands with this many reefs. Despite my concern about signing up for the Jolly Pirates, I had a wonderful day aboard, enjoying the snorkeling by the Lighthouse immensely. Again I saw many spotlight parrotfish, with the males looking so vastly different than it’s bright turquouse mate. Usually in nature, it’s the other way around, the female with the drab colors, the males with the splendid colors. Here is Aruba, we also discovered an underwater paradise. Unlike DePalm Island, which has much reef damage, these reefs were pristine (especially in comparison with what we saw in Grand Cayman.)
We also dove at the wreck of the Antille (?), a German ship that was captured at the beginning of WW2, then regained by it’s crew who set out to sink it, blowing it into 2 pieces on a sandbar rather than risking the chance of the Dutch using it again them. It lays there almost fully intact to date. It is sunk in over 60 feet of water, and my breath was taken away momentarily by the size of the shipwreck. Even with all the years it has been on the bottom, the ship is well preserved. You can see where the engine room was located, and how the Germans managed to blow the ship into 2 pieces. Although the fish and coral have now taken the ship for their own, it is eerie to see the portholes on the side of the ship as it lays motionless, preserved in it’s deep water grave for many years to come. Aruba had gotten rain too, but it seems to have passed by the time we got to the island, and the day was lovely for snorkeling. |