4th of July on Madiba

We can always trust Simone to go all out with celebrations! Not only did she decorate the boat for the occasion but she even supplied red, blue and silver beads for everyone to wear, a red, white and blue hair band with stars for myself and a stars and stripes bikini which she wore on the day! We had a great Independence day although we were not very sure what America gained independence from as we didn't think it did actually belong to England. After some investigation on the internet now it was indeed from our British Queen. (more info here if you're really interested) Seems like England used to own the world...

The divers did a dive at Coral Gardens on the 4th while Colleen and I snorkeled along. There is a plane wreck which crashed after take off from Tortola.

Some more info about this plane crash: 

A recent addition to the dive site is the remains of Atlantic Air BVI's Shorts 360 airplane. In 1993, after making an abortive take off, their one and only aircraft landed in the water about 200 feet off the end of the runway. No one was hurt, but after the airplane was refloated from 30 feet of water it languished hidden in a hangar for many months before being used as a movie prop in a BBC film. It eventually found its way out to Great Dog where it was sunk as part of the BVI's continual artificial reef program. The plane, without wings or tail, sits in the sand patch in about 40 feet of water.

(source)

*watch videos in HD fullscreen - it's much better :)

Coral Gardens, Great Dogs, BVI from Anneliese Mostert on Vimeo.

I showed the video to some children and they were very very intrigued by this airplane underwater. I actually made this cute little video with kiddie music and all specially for them. 

Under the Caribbean Sea from Anneliese Mostert on Vimeo.

When they asked to see more videos I showed them the two diving ones I made which they actually enjoyed more and wanted to see over and over again. They would either ask for the one "where I float on the top" (this one) or "the plane one". In the end we had to pause the video to discuss this plane wreck as they had too many questions. A few were: How did it get there? How did the engines fail? Why did the engines fail? Did the people get wet? Were they wearing their swimming costumes? But how did it happen? (asked repeatedly) Where are the seats? Where is the pilot? Why did they take the seats out? Why?

I grabbed a Pritt glue stick lying on the table and demonstrated how the airplane took off from the runway, with sound effects, and then how the engines go silent as they stopped working (not that I know why it really crashed but I had to give them some answer). Asked them what they think would happen next (pritt suspended above table) and they said it would crash into the sea. Then had a sink vs float discussion as well as airplane safety devices like inflatable rafts etc. After this they were fairly satisfied and carried on watching only to ask where I was, not quite grasping my excuse of a poorly ear. I might have to make them a snorkeling video in which I feature too!