Nov. 5, 2013--Tuesday:

Today was the day the "kids" flew home.  They had a morning flight, so we were up and at it by 8am.  It happened to be one of the prettiest days we'd had so far.  The sun was shining brightly.  But even so, they said they had quite a bumpy flight back to Miami.
Finally got to see Charlotte Amalie with blue skies

 and blue water.

 I imagine these are some of the boats out of Charlotte Amelie that take cruisers on pirate excursions.

 I meant to take a better picture of gas prices, but never did.   Gas was $1.90/gallon more here than back home in St. Louis!  Another disadvantage to having the big Jeep Wrangler Sport as opposed to the intermediate car I had reserved. 

 We found the highways are not marked well, so it was nice seeing the starfish signs when we were going to one of those areas. 

After dropping Angie and Josh off at the airport, we headed back to the Elysian to hit the water and enjoy some snorkeling with sunshine. 
Also loved that we always had free beach chairs here.

 looking towards the left bank that we would follow around to a pretty nice reef on the other side.

 some of our fishie friends

 This is around the point and continuing left.

 Still going left.  Would love to have that house!

 Another file fish

 a yellow wrasse

 We usually turn around before we get to the sandy area by the house above, but this time we went all the way to the sand.  Right before the sandy area we found another lively reef with some more fish I've not seen anywhere else on the island.  I saw some of these guys in St. Lucia last year, but nowhere else.

 This reef was a bit worn, but had lots of places for fish to hide.

 Hadn't seen one of these guys before.

 And there were a few of them.

 At one point I looked to my right and this huge barracuda was about 5 feet from me.  He had to have been at least 3 or 4' long. 

 He slowly swam off over the sandy area.  There he goes.

 These needle fish are hard to get a good picture of, but I finally got one.  They hang out at the surface of the water and if you don't look up, you never see them.  I tried to get a good picture of their cousins (Bally-whos, or something like that), but wasn't successful.  They have round yellow tails.

 Here's Ken playing with an anchor.  I think the anchor won.

 Here's a smaller barracuda (2' maybe?) that likes to hang out at the shallows of the Elysian beach.

After a couple hours, we headed back to our room to grab some stuff for a sleep over at the Wyndham Bluebeard's Beach Resort.  I wanted to see how those rooms are, so I booked us a night there.  It seems a lot more available then the Elysian so we have more opportunity to use our VIP discount here.  Noone was willing to commit to staying there without seeing it first, though.  We still had our room at the Elysian, too, so didn't have to hassle with packing up and checking out.

Bluebeard's Beach Resort:

View of the beach from the check in building.

Nice grounds!  They even have a little store on property and this large chess board.

 View of the condos from the beach side.

 Although the "crab" town, or whatever they called the muddy area seen partly here at the bottom left seems to be a mosquito nursery. 

 Compared to a lot of Wyndham pools I've been to, this one is very nice.  Even like the pool bar.  But compared to the Elysian pool, this one pales in comparison.  It also doesn't have a hot tub.

Inside our studio unit:
It is a good size for a studio.  The bed was comfortable.

 The front door was to the left; bathroom to the right.  Didn't like that there were steps from the kitchen/bathroom area up to the rest of the unit.

 Note the steps again.  Could see me falling down them in the middle of the night.

 king bed.  small dining table for 2 under the tv in the livingroom. 

 I liked how the ottoman's lid flipped to make an end table.

 small but adequate kitchenette.

 nice size bathroom, but still no tub.

 from patio door towards front door.  I believe the couch is also a fold out.

View from our patio in building E.

All in all, I liked the resort.  Probably not as much as the Elysian.  But snorkeling is good here, too (when the weather cooperates).  If we couldn't stay at the Elysian, I wouldn't hesitate staying here.
We did head out to snorkel.  It was still somewhat murky, but better then a few days ago. 

blue tang

smooth trunkfish

 Triton.

 This huge fish swam by as I was looking at the shell.  Some sort of jack?  Almost missed him!  Made the snapper and grouper on St. John seem small!  Would have liked to have gotten a better picture of it, but it swam too fast for me to chase down.

 Back to checking out the shell critter.

 a graveyard of sea biscuits.

more squid buddies

 There were actually 4 high hats here.  This is the only picture I got with more then just the bigger one.

 Another stingray in the sand.  Note the barb on the top of the tail, that's what you don't want to be stuck with!

As the sun was dipping low, we made our way out of the water.

Looked like we were going to have a great sunset, but it sort of fizzled out.  In fact, we didn't have a great sunset any of the 9 nights we were there!

 Applied Photoshop camera filter for some color.

 It is a good place to watch cruise ships go by!  We didn't have problems with sand fleas at sunset, but the mosquitos sure were bad!  Even when we went to the pool after taking pictures the mosquitos ate us alive here.  Didn't have that problem anywhere else on the island.  I think it's because of the "crab habitat" muddy area between the condos and the beach.

We decided to go for fast food that night.  Note to self---don't go to McDonald's on St. Thomas!!!  Their service was about as good as Molly Malone's and again my dessert was foiled!  They were out of ice cream!