The Añasco Tower is a fun quick stop to make when you drive into Rincón on the 115 that offers gorgeous 180 degree views of the sea. A great place for a photo shoot too! Check it out some time on your drive in to town!
Tada! Torre de Añasco and a little tree pose for ya
Looking to the east toward Mayaguez -Check out the Flamboyans!
And to the west around the Rincón Peninsula
B and Me
After a good rain we tend to see a lot of wild hermit crabs out and about. They are so cool. I want to learn more about them. Like, where do they find their shells? Some must be from the sea, but what a long way to travel when you’re that small! Some of them pick the most beautiful homes! Some are more reticent than others who like to pinch me when I pick them up. I just can’t help but want to look into their little home and at their weird pokey eyes, hard red crab legs and quivering antennae.
This guy was just not afraid of me at all!
One day I went out and saw two scrambling around right outside the cabana door. So the turkeys, chickens and I went to inspect them amidst the fallen mangos. In this video you get a sense of the scale of these hermit crabs in relation to the turkeys who look like huge dinosaurs tromping around. One of them looked just a like a rock moving around. What a strange and wondrous life it is to live in our own little nature show.
I hope you enjoy some of these recent island scenes from our yard and out and about.
Some of the delicious produce we grow here at our place: pomarrosa (large pink pear-shaped fruit), mulberry (black berry) and Surinam cherry (little pumpkin looking fruit)
This sort of captures a feeling of Rincón doesn’t it? Horse and sea
Britton with a house jack through the tropical gardens to the cabin
At the WOK for a fun fundraiser for DAR, the animal rescue group
Check out this awesome frog we saw against a restaurant window after a heavy rain!
A wild parrot up in a tree
Turkey mama and even more pavitos came out of the forest. We’re going to have to downsize on the number of turkeys as we are getting overrun!
Roadside fruit vendor under a mango tree (and/or broken down truck 😉 )
Hanging out at Steps Beach before snorkeling
One of our very favorite water activities here in Puerto Rico and Rincón specifically is snorkeling. It is inexpensive -all you need is a snorkeling mask and some fins. I often go out without fins because it is less of a hassle, but if I were to go out for a long session I would wear them as they help tremendously in propulsion underwater. It’s fairly easy to learn how to do too. Pretty much as long as you can swim in the ocean, you can snorkel. It takes a little bit to get your bearings, but once you’ve done it a few times it’s super simple. And it’s also something you can do basically all year round. It is sort of like the yin to the yang of surfing. They are both an ode to the sea, but in different ways.
Surfing needs waves. Snorkeling needs flat waters. Surfing is floating just above the waterline, snorkeling is just below it. Surfing needs plenty of space to move, snorkeling can be done just floating in one area if desired. Surfing is about focused power and snorkeling is about focused gentleness. Surfing is mainly about the action, snorkeling is mainly about the observation. Surfing is fast and snorkeling is slow. To me, that we have both world class surfing and snorkeling in Rincón is a perfect expression of these two complementary sides of life.
Our favorite place to snorkel is at the Tres Palmas Reserve that is right off Steps Beach. It’s a little of a challenge for some people to enter because it doesn’t have a sandy bottom, but once in, a magical underwater world opens up. It has one of the best Elkhorn coral formations in the world! And with that comes lots of fish and sea turtles too! This has been a long process of conservation and it has really paid off. It is just bustling with life as you can see in the above video. We float around completely immersed in this other world almost like spacemen with minimal gravity on another planet. And then we enjoy learning about and identifying the various strange life forms we see.
Close up of an Elkhorn coral
We have snorkeled some other places in Rincón, but Tres Palmas is by far the best. Over in Corcega or Almendros the waters are super clear with long sandy beaches, but there’s not nearly as many fish. The Marina can have some good snorkeling as it’s directly connected to Tres, but there are too many boats going in and out and that scares the fish away. At the balneario, there are sandy bottoms so it’s easy to enter, but pretty much only little fish like sardines.
On the other side of the point at Sandy Beach we have seen sea snakes (or maybe eels?) and a few other cool things, but it often has too many waves to have good clarity for regular snorkeling. Overall, though I always enjoy snorkeling pretty much anywhere because by simply putting on a small piece of transparent plastic we suddenly have a little window into a part of the world that is rarely visible. It’s pretty incredible and I am so grateful to live in a place with this wondrous space just under our noses.