Esperanza, Vieques

[Kevin's Post]
Wednesday morning we moved west a few more miles to one of the main towns on Vieques, Esperanza. We anchored off the town dock and dinghyed to shore to see what the town had to offer. Just north of the dinghy dock was a kayak shop advertising nightly tours of the nearby bioluminescent bay. We had been wanting to see it, so we went in and talked to the guy. It would be a full moon so not ideal conditions for seeing the bioluminescence, but we were there, so decided to take a chance and made reservations.
After making kayak reservations, we wandered down the Esperanza boardwalk which is lined with restaurants, bars and shops. We had a great lunch at a place called Bellybuttons. Having no plans for the afternoon, we continued to wander down the boardwalk and turned it into a pub crawl.

Later that evening we returned to the kayak shop at the appointed time to go to the bioluminescent bay. 14 of us piled into a large van for the 3 mile bumpy ride to the bay. It sounded like the van was scraping the bottom the whole way, and the trees were definitely scraping both the sides the whole way. The road was no wider than the van, I'm not sure what they would do if they met someone coming the opposite way. Arriving at the bay, Alexi, our guide tossed all the kayaks in the water, gave us each paddles and made us wade through 6 inches of smelly mud to get on our kayaks. Then he jumped on one himself and told us to follow him. The moon was so bright, I was not optimistic that we would see anything. But as we paddled deeper into the bay, you could start to see little explosions of blue light with every paddle stroke. When we got out to the middle of the bay we all tied up to a buoy and jumped into the water for a swim. That's when the fun started. Every movement of your body was trailed by blue bioluminescence. Even with the full moon, it was clearly visible and really cool. We swam around for an hour in the water playing with the light. To see what it really looked like, go here:

I didn't have high expectations of the biobay tour, but it was totally awesome. We are going to try to go again sometime when there is no moon.

After the biobay tour we were able to rinse off at the kayak shop and went back to a restaurant called Duffy's for dinner. This place had amazing food, so if you're ever in Esperanza, check it out.