Mangrove Jungle: Vines, Crustaceans and Birds, Oh My!

In town we had seen signs for "Mangrove Tours" so we figured there was something to see in the mangroves.  Not wanting to spend money on a tour and being a pretty resourceful bunch, we decided to venture out ourselves.  Scott took a look at the charts and noted a sort of river carved through the mangroves about two miles from where our boats lay peacefully at anchor off Les Trois Ilets in Martinique.  He plotted the course and respective waypoints into our handheld GPS (which is loaded with all the charts of the Caribbean) and we were off.  What followed was a perfectly beautiful afternoon navigating our dinghies through the narrow, marshy waterway that meandered through the spongey, vine-y forest of roots.  We saw birds, crabs (Isla's favorite), fish and all sorts of interesting plants and flowers.  The kids were happy, the adults were happy and it was a few hours well spent.

In other news, despite the fact that our router is still on the fritz, we're back online for at least twenty-four hours so I hope to upload some posts of what our past week has entailed, beacause it has been fantastic.  Thanks for the understanding and patience.

* After my last post, many of you wanted to know the camera/photo editing I used for these recent pictures.  Nothing fancy, just the "dramatic" setting on our Olympus Tough Camera (my primary camera is a Canon G12 but the "tough" camera is our everyday camera).  It's fun to experiment and play with settings and filters, for sure.