Natural History in Barbados

Today was due to be a quiet one after the impromptu quayside party last night. One of the Gimcrack crew had his birthday and rum punches were drunk until the early hours. Everyone here is so friendly and keen to talk about their boats despite any language difficulties. It is quite a relief to hear that even he wonderful and immaculate vessels of our fleet suffer the same problems under the ravages of time as Croix des Gardes.

Harrison's Cave, Barbados

Today we decided to treat the children to a visit to a tourist attraction - Harrison's Cave. We learnt that Barbados has a very different geological history to the other Antilles. The other islands are all the result of volcanic activity as the Atlantic Plate collides with the Caribbean Plate. The subduction zone causes a deep valley in the sea floor which is evident around Dominican Republic where the sea bed is over 7000m deep. To the east of the Lesser Antilles, this valley was covered with layers of sediment from South America and then layer of calcium and silicon skeletons of the planktonic life to form rock. Over time, the Atlantic plate has buckled upwards and eventually breached the ocean surface to form the Scotland region of Barbados. Now there was a sea shallow enough to support coral reefs, but later the island was pushed upwards again to expose this reef as new land. This happened a further three ties forming a number of coral terraces, meaning that the island is predominantly limestone and coral. The high annual rainfall helped form the cave system and its stalactites and stalagmites which are the fastest growing in the world (so we were told).

We took a tram tour and both children loved it. The chambers were spectacular. Matthew was even more pleased that we were visited by a family group of Green Monkeys in the rainforest gully before the cave tour.

Eared Dove nest building by the boat

The birdlife in the hills has been a little disappointing around the routes we have taken. We have seen few birds not already identified in Bridgetown. Independence Square is home to eared doves, feral pigeons, large hummingbirds, grackles, Barbados bullfinches and antillean bananaquits and these seemed to also be the main species in the hills. We also saw white egrets today, both inland and flying along the beach, and ground doves. We've also seen giant millipedes, massive land snails with conical shells, more ordinarily shaped but equally enormous round snails, and several types of small lizard. Some of these even run across my lap in the park whilst I am on the internet (we get wifi from the library across the square from the boat and so have to sit in the park to be online). However, the most numerous residents are the biting midges which plague our evenings and make our days unbearbly itchy. We must find mosquito nets for our beds soon.

Tomorrow, James plans to visit the port to obtain our departure clearance to enable us to leave early on Monday. We shall go down to Oistins in the afternoon for the legendary Friday fish fry. Dave and Ollie are still managing to party hard - both only returned back to our boat after we'd had breakfast! Elizabeth says they've gone nocturnal.