2022 Life Logs, Day 112: Fairy Lights in the Bioluminescent Bay
Date: Friday, April 22, 2022
Weather: Mostly Cloudy with Intermittent Rain; High 86, Low 71 degrees F
Location: At Home in Holiday Inn and Tropical Casino, Ponce, Puerto Rico
Check out time in our pool house Airbnb was at 11 am this morning.
We knew when we booked it that we were a night shy of a place to stay, but it was the one we wanted, so we took it thinking we would have time once we got to Rincon to make other arrangements for our last night in Puerto Rico. By the time I started looking for something it was too late to get an Airbnb, so I booked rooms in a hotel on the south coast in Ponce. We knew we were going to swim and snorkel in the bioluminescent bay near La Parguera on the south coast tonight, so here we are in the Holiday Inn Ponce and Tropical Casino. It was late when we arrived, but the view of the pool from my room looks amazing. Otherwise, I would give the rest of the place a B rating, but just like the rain we have had this week, I am going to ignore that and not let it keep me from enjoying out time here. Justin and family are with us, so we will have one more morning of fun together before we head north to San Juan for our flight home tomorrow evening.
Now for the amazing part of today . . . swimming in the bioluminescent bay. As a family, we swam in the bioluminescent bay in Vieques in 2011 when Heather and Justin and families met Windbird there as she was returning from her travels around the world. There were only three grandchildren at that time, but they remembered the experience and wanted to do it again on the south coast of the main island at La Parguera. I had booked a two-hour snorkeling trip along with the bio bay experience, but the snorkeling was cancelled due to rain. We filled those two hours by going to an Earth Day Fair where Ziggy and Coco’s school had a booth to raise money for a new school club.
Then we went to Justin and Joe’s to say goodbye to all the animals at Finca Maravilla.
On our way to La Parguera, we made a slight detour to see the salt flats of Cabo Roho. The Interpretive Center was closed for the day by the time we arrived, but we could see the flats as we drove out on the Cape, and we stopped and walked on the one of the trails.
The southwest coast of Puerto Rico is very different from the lush green along the west coast. It is dry with a totally different kind of vegetation. After our short exploration, we drove on to La Parguera to get on one of the Paradise Scuba and Snorkeling Center Bio Bay Tour boats. We were on a boat with about fifteen other people. The Bio Bay tours start late in the day as it has to be dark to see the teeny tiny dinoflagellates light up in the water when they are disturbed. The boat crew served boxed dinners of empanadas and had plenty of cold drinks available. As we ate, we traveled to a small island that used to be used for shark research where the boat docked to let us explore the small mangrove island and swim in the area where the sharks used to be kept.
Only Sam, Jonah, Coco, and Ziggy jumped in the water, but we all enjoyed discovering sea life along the shore. Justin found a big pincushion urchin
and Heather and Jed found brittle stars, baby black urchins, and an anemone hiding in a small pool along with baby fish.
The pool was like a small sea life nursery. There was a boardwalk through the mangroves, so we also walked that loop.
When we heard the whistle from our boat, we knew it was finally time to go to the bioluminescent bay.
By the time we reached the bay, it was dark. When we stopped, the boat captain turned off all lights on the boat and explained to us what we would see. He suggested wearing a dive mask to best see the underwater light show. I put on my dive fins as well, so I could more easily glide through the water. I watched as others jumped in and didn’t see the bioluminescence. But when I jumped in, it was magical. Hundreds of tiny pin pricks lit up my arms moved through the water.
I heard Heather tell the boys to put their arms in front of them Superman style, so I did that and was amazed by the show of lights. It looked like fairy lights. And when I dove down a foot or so, the disturbance caused more to light up. Once when Coco went under and came up, you could see the ‘fairy lights’ in her hair. The captain let us snorkel and frolic in the water for about thirty minutes before we had to get back onboard. We were lucky that it was a cloudy evening as the moonlight would have made the bioluminescence harder to see. But it was dark, the water was warm, and the dinoflagellates worked their magic on us. 
Tomorrow morning, we will spend time in the pool overlooking the ocean and visit the indigenous ceremonial grounds in Ponce, before driving back to San Juan to head home.
