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Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Bernkastel-Kues in Rheinland

Emily had a work trip in Germany, so I took a couple days off to escort her to the Fatherland.  Since she was flying in to Frankfurt-Hahn, I picked a small town in the Moselle Valley for us to explore briefly.  Bernkastel-Kues is situated right on the river in the heart of German wine country.  The hills were draped in vineyards, and the Landshut Castle overlooked the ancient town.

I trekked up the green hill behind our hotel to the castle a couple times.  The view of the river was beguiling.
This was taken early in the morning before the town had awakened.
The fog clung to the top of the valley before the sun burned it off.

We saw the barge-like ship on the river the night prior.  It seemed like a small family lived on it, with a minivan parked on the back.
St. Michael's Church peeks above the rest of the town.
I don't know much about wine, but the town was awash with it and the fields of grapes made for an amazing environment.
The half-timbered buildings and cobblestone streets were timeless.
Here's the scene from the square early in the morning.
The Spitzhaeuschen - a famous building right off the square that starts narrow and gets wider.
Em was drawn to the local law-enforcement instruments.
 St Michael guarding the square.

The Coat of Arms for the town...looks like two keys, a crayfish, and a bear.  I wish I knew the history behind it.
There's no wonder why fairytales come from this part of the world.
I'm not a huge fan of my camera's panorama setting, but this stitched photo kinda makes sense.

Anyways, thanks for checking out the quick trip!

Sunday, July 22, 2012

The Seas of Tenerife

While in the Canaries, Emily and I spent a lot of time on the water.  We've already posted about Whale Watching, so this post will cover our time snorkeling and fishing.

I have a new toy - it's a camera that can go anywhere.  I wore it once while snorkeling and here are a few screenshots from the footage.  Above are a couple of little of common bottom-dwelling fish.  I don't know what they're called.
We walked down to rocky points on the far side of beaches.  I just figured fish would congregate around rocks, so we went looking.
There were a variety of fish.  We saw long, sleek Pinfish that hung out on the surface, black panfish types with glowing blue accents, and a couple little green fish with stripes and spots.
My view with the fish-eye lens when I came up for air.
Last year I finally read Hemmingway's The Old Man and the Sea, which forced me to research where I could go to catch a Marlin in this part of the world.
I went out with a three-man crew and about seven other folks out of Los Christianos.  Fish thing in the morning we trolled with a handful of downriggers.  Apparently the wahoo and skipjack tuna had been up shallow earlier in the week.  It had been eight days since the Captain had hooked a Marlin, and he thought our chances were better with the wahoo.  After a few hours of trolling through birds and skipjack that were obviously feeding, we decided to go bottom fishing on a rock pile.  Here's uh, I forget his name, but he was making cut bait in the above photo.
The bottom fishing resulted in a couple rays and a bunch of smaller fish.
I let my big bottom rig sit next to me and grabbed a spinning rod to catch some Spanish Mackerel to use as chum and other cut bait.
A couple times, by accident, I caught some trash fish.  There were a handful of little brown flounder-like fish, and then I caught one of these Aranas fish for the first time.  It turns out that Aranas fish are very poisonous, and you should not try to hold it while unhooking it.  As I grabbed for it, the crew screamed at me to get it out of the boat.  The Captain said that he was so glad he got to me before I got stung because he didn't want to have to take me to the hospital.  He didn't know that I had two pricks in my hand from the venomous dorsal fin or see the blood streaming down my hand.  Being a typical tough-guy wannabe, I wiped the blood off my hand and got back to fishing like nothing had happened.  Within a minute or two, my hand felt like it was on fire.  Kind of like a really intense bee sting.  I took my pulse every couple minutes and drank water, hoping I hadn't got stuck too bad, and just kept fishing.  The fiery pain had crawled up my arm, but I persisted in my fishing, hoping it wouldn't get bad enough to notify the crew.  After an hour had passed, the pain had died off considerably.  Sometimes it pays off to just act tough...
Emily didn't have to deal with that episode of stupidity - we picked her up at the harbor halfway through the day.
An Irishman thought he was stuck on the bottom, but slowly realized it was just a 150 pound ray.  After about 20 minutes of fighting, it surfaced at the boat.
Besides the big ray, I hooked up with a large Hammerhead Shark.  The fight didn't last long.  As I ran up to the bow, strapping my fighting belt on, the drag shrieked and the line snapped.  So much for big game fishing.  No Marlin this time.
When we weren't in or on the water, we enjoyed our time at the beach.
Tenerife is an amazing island with all sorts of oceanic activities to engage in.  If you're in this part of the world, it's a great place to check out.

Whale Watching in the Canary Islands

Earlier this month, Emily and I took a long Ryanair flight down to the Canary Islands, west of Morocco.  We spent an afternoon on a whale watching tour, and here are some photos of it.  The above picture is of a mural in the harbor near where we stayed, Los Christianos.
We saw several pods of Pilot Whales not far from Tenerife's coast.  Here's a shot of a whale with the highest mountain in Spain (yeah, Spain...) in the background - Mount Teide.
We pretty much had the boat to ourselves.  There was a french family who stayed indoors and that was about it.
The Guide told us that the Pilot Whales, during the summer, come up shallow to feed at night and then chill out near the surface during the day.  Here's a pod of three adults and a baby.
We had hoped to see some of the larger whale species, but the constant action with the Pilot Whales made for some fun.
The whales were very inquisitive, and often the pods would swim close to check us out and dart under the boat if we made noise.

Baby whale - probably the cutest thing in the ocean.

Well, it was a fun day out on the water...I'll follow with some more pictures from Tenerife.