It was a lot of work, but I think it was worth the effort!

We got up early for breakfast and then strolled over to the dive shop on the dock.  Here, we joined Matt and Tracy, a young couple from Boston, on a motor boat with our crew, Duke and Ethan, on an excursion out into the Caribbean to go  whale- and dolphin-watching before heading off to spend the rest of the trip for some snorkeling.  Okay, the journey there was anything BUT exciting or adventurous.  Let's see - it was raining, the seas were rougher than you usually experience at this time of year, we all got nauseous from the exhaust fumes, and all we saw while heading south was a couple of flying fish - no whales or dolphins.  After about two hours of tormenting, though, we dropped anchor at Anse Chastenet, off the southeast coast of St. Lucia.  This made all the tormentation worth while!

Anse Chastenet is in a beautiful location, about a mile north of the Petit Piton mountain.  It's also the edge of some of St. Lucia's best snorkeling and diving.  Even though we only spent about 90 minutes in the water, it was breath-takingly beautiful!  Even Victoria got into it!  She didn't put any goggles on, but she did put on a life jacket and have a blast swimming around in the 12ft water with us.  I couldn't even begin to describe the beauty of the coral reef and the array of fish, much less which fish we were actually looking at.  The lack of quantity of fish was more than made up for by the beauty of the whole scene.  Nonetheless, we had a blast (see pictures below)!

Around noon, we pulled up anchor and made bearings south east past the Petit and Gros Pitons out to where Duke thought the dolphins, at least, had their feeding grounds.  We were not disappointed!  We spent the next forty-five minutes playing with the dolphins - chasing them and them chasing us!  We must have seen about twenty or thirty of them playing around our boat - running in front of the bow or dancing in the wake!  They looked as though they were having a blast!

We made our way back to the resort for lunch and then some quiet time in the room before setting out for dinner.  We asked Bruce and Ann, a couple from London, England that we met on the first night at dinner, to join us as they had made dinner reservations for the same time at the same restaurant we had, the Green Parrot.  We were really looking forward to this restaurant - the description both in our Fodor's guide and our Rough Travel guide portrayed it quite well and its location in the hills high above Castries seemed particularly appealing.  Victoria and Kelley even got dressed up with bougainvillea flowers in their hair.

Well, there were sadly only two things correct about either profiles (or Bruce and Ann's, for that matter!): the location was quite spectacular and the steaks that Bruce, Kelley, and I had were all quite delicious.  Otherwise, EVERYTHING was disappointing.  The service was sub-par, their menu was quite good, except that they were out of almost everything, their wine list consisted of all of THREE reds, THREE whites, a rose, and a bubbly, and the atmosphere was quite stuffy.  Quite a disappointing evening for all six of us other than the enjoyable conversations with Bruce and Ann.  We made it back to the hotel by around 10:00 to end a day whose few high points fortunately outweighed the many lower points.

Tomorrow: A drive AROUND St. Lucia