El Combate to Hurricane Omar
We spent the next day or two working our way up the west coast, where nothing of particular note took place until we arrived on the north coast town of Isabella. This town has a famous surfer break at Jobos Beach (pronounced “Hobos”), and we found a hotel that was right on the water again. It had a nice balcony from which we could watch surfers all day. It had been a stressful trip at times up to this point, so we holed up there for several days. During this time we found some fascinating erosion features – the waves had eroded the soft stone into something that I would have thought could only be found on the surface of the moon.
Obviously, there would be less water on the moon, but, it’s the only thing it reminded me of… except perhaps for where Bruce Willis had to drill that well in the movie “Armageddon”. Anyway, the waves constantly pummeled the rock creating some quite impressive spouts – sometimes almost 50 feet in the air!
These rocks were part of formations that were hundreds of feet long and popped up here and there for miles along the shore – which made for a lot of interesting exploring – and plenty of photo ops.
The last is one of my favorites from the whole trip. It was taken at very close range – about 3 inches – with my cool waterproof camera. A bit farther down the road we found a swamp filled with egrets (I think? Ornithology is not my foremost talent) nesting…
And then we took the party underwater for snorkeling at Shacks Beach. Just finding it was an adventure in itself, but that’s too long to get into here 
The visibility wasn’t great and it was my first time snorkeling and taking pictures so the pictures didn’t turn out as well as I’d hoped. But it wasn’t my fault! The dratted fish kept moving! Anyway, you’ll see some much better snorkeling pictures next entry. Meanwhile, to digress a few days, we heard that Hurricane Omar was going to pay Puerto Rico a visit. Apparently, Omar was quite angry at Puerto Rico for some reason (maybe he didn’t like fast food and traffic?), so he was preparing to mop the floor with it. At first, we heard we were going to get 20 inches of rain, category 2+ hurricane, etc. Naturally we stocked up on water and food and watched the weather channel more frequently.
Next day, the forecast was 10 inches. The next day it was 2. Then it “hit”… and we got about 10 drops. Seriously, it never even rained. It blew a few gusts, looked kinda dark on the horizon the afternoon we snorkeled and then… nothing. Not that I’m complaining about how it turned out, but the gloom and doom forecast was way off base – but then the weather channel is known to overreact… it keeps people watching the weather channel.
More next time…
Leave a Comment
Posted on October 22nd, 2008 by Natnee and filed under Puerto Rico |
