Provo - Conch Farm

We had signed up with a local dive shop to do a two tank dive this morning. Of course the weather system that we were trying to outrun yesterday caught up with us here, with squally and windy weather conditions that forced the divemaster to cancel our dive. The waves were breaking pretty hard out at the reefs and it would've been a rough and uncomfortable ride to get out there. We're disappointed because today is pretty much the only day we would've been able to dive -- tomorrow we have a narrow weather window to motor 100 miles down to Luperon in the Dominican Republic. So here we are in a place where diving is the primary tourist attraction and we didn't get to go. But we took it in stride. Because Provo has other tourist attractions. Like conch.

Since we had the rental car we took a drive out to the east end of the island where the Conch World Provo sea farm is located. Our tour guide, Denver, explained why and how they farm the queen conch. Why? Primarily for export and to take advantage of size regulations. Local fisherman have strict requirements on how big the conch has to be before you can take it, whereas at the conch farm they can sell the smaller baby conch which are prepared in the same fashion as escargot. As to the how, the sea farm has leased 60 acres of sea bottom for their "sub-sea pasture" where they have pens to hold the conch (not that conch wander around all that much but they do have a foot and can travel). They also have onshore pools where they keep the younger, smaller conchs before they are big enough to be put out to "pasture". Total number of visitors on the tour: 2. Total number of conchs: 5,500,000. The highlight of the trip was when Denver introduced us to Sally and Gerry, the farm's "trained" conchs. When picked up these two guys come as far out of their shells as possible so that you can see what the whole animal looks like (normally conchs kind of hide when picked up). So all in all it was an interesting way to spend the morning. Not surprisingly, this is the only conch farm in the entire world.

The rest of the day we just ambled around in the rental car before returning to the marina. Our boat happens to be docked right behind two police boats that are continuously staffed. I got to talking with the captain of one of the boats and asked him if it was like a fire station, where the guys hang out on the boat and wait to be called to an emergency. He said that actually it was unusual for them to be at the dock but the weather has been so bad that they couldn't go out and do their patrols. Apparently the sole purpose of these police boats is to prevent illegal immigration from Haiti. According to the captain, every single night at least one boat tries to make the crossing from Haiti (about a hundred miles away), sometimes filled with hundreds of people (he'd seen as many as 200 crammed into a single small boat). So these policemen go out every night in search of small boats running with no lights that are barely visible on radar. He said that despite the challenges of finding a small boat on the open sea, they do manage to catch and deport most of them. Very few get in, which is why he seemed upset that they couldn't go out due to the weather because "they'll come anyway, even in weather as bad as this."