Day Three--Is that a barracuda staring at us?

Day three--slow down! It is all going to fast. We started off early with a breakfast cooked by Captain Dad. Eggs, Eggo Waffles and Bacon. It was a breakfast fit for a king. We cleaned breakfast up and headed straight for "The baths" Local folklore says this is where the pirates stopped off to hit the fresh water that was collected in pools or "baths". The place is incredible. You have to dingey to the shore but then you can't dingey on shore as there are no moorings or docks, so you have to go back out a ways to the mooring ball and then swim back in.

Once on shore we grabbed our snorkel gear and had the most incredible hour and a half of snorkling known to man. There were rocks just off the beach which created underwater canyons and valleys which were full of every type of sea animal. You would swim through the canyons and you would be in 20 ft deep water and then turn a corner and be swimming in 4 ft water. After being out for a while. (NO shark sightings) we decided to head back and our route back included a swim through a 4 foot wide canyon with rocks on both sides. As we started into the gap right smack in the middle was a barracuda (about 3 1/2 long). We couldn't go through. We thought we would swim through underneath him, but as we got close he opened his mouth to eat us up--so we quickly swam away. Nathan Bray has mastered the reverse doggy paddle in a most unique way. He says, "I can go really fast that way." Nathan Richins being 6"2 and close to 200 lbs never even swam in as his fear froze him! Brian Campbell wasn't so brave with the barracuda, but he did discover an underwater arch and took it upon himself to find out if there was an opening on the other side. Once he made it I was good to go!

Now that we will all have barracuda nightmares we headed back to the island and we hiked to the restaurant at the top of the mountain. It was cool, there were lots of caves to climb through, you had to rope through certain parts and half of it was in foot deep water. I have some great pictures I will post later. Once you make it there is a nice clean pool (a bit of to much chlorine if you ask me) and some great virgin pina colada's waiting at the top. We ate luch took some group pictures and then headed back to the boat. We immediately took off for Cooper Island. There was no wind, but we put up the sails just to look like professionals, but then realized when no wind was catching the sails we looked like idiots so down they came. When we arrived at Cooper Island the lunch, snorkeling,sailing and the sun took its toll and we all had to take naps...except for myself and Nate Richins. I had to catch up on a bit of my online class I'm teaching and Nate's excuse was he couldn't find anywhere comfortable to sleep. There was a bit of brotherly mentoring on common courtesy for my brother Nate Bray as he did not obey the following very obvious rules.
#1 Do not crawl into another man's bed with a wet sandy bathing suit.
#2 To alleviate the problem of #1 do not take off the wet sandy bathing suit and try to sleep in another mans bed in your birthday suit.
All alarms on the boat went off as I made sure he didn't break the two above rules. All he could say was "What?, What's wrong?" Nice try---playing dumb didn't work. My 12 year old pulls that trick and it doesn't work for her either.

After our nap (3 hours) we headed to dinner. The food was amazing! The next time you are at Cooper Island I highly recommend the B-bque chicken or the steak. It was incredible. The funny thing was after dinner we came back and everyone was exhausted from their naps so they all went to bed early. Around 9. Nate, Nate and I stayed up and laughed. What a great day! I miss you Gale, Chloe, Olivia, Elle and Ava. I miss your shining, happy smiling faces. It just isn't the same when I don't see you everyday. I love you and I am thinking about you!