Abracadabra – Now you see it…

Last night the resort put on a magic show called Abracadabra. It was a reasonably good show with the majority of tricks based on slight-of-hand, cards appearing out of thin air and disappearing, tables magically levitating and some more elaborate tricks I have seen in Vegas or other places over the years. The kids in the resort (me included) had great fun pointing our when magic pencils disappeared and ended up sticking out of the magician’s ear.

The resort goes to great length to keep people entertained. A section of the beach will switch from “Mexico night” and disappear the next day and the following day “Wild West night” with a mechanical bull ride will appear. Some things (like these) are more entertaining while things like Lily the Bengal tiger in the cage are more challenging. Not an appearance that makes one happy but their seems to be no place for her to reappear after a life in captivity.

Speaking of things that either don’t appear or they disappear, Friday came and went with no generator, and when pushed by Sharon we heard from the Mexican distributor. To their surprise, we heard that the generator had not shipped from Florida yet. We will not find out until Tuesday if it has disappeared all together (no stock) or if something else will appear in its place.

Another disappearing act ( this time we were the prestidigitators) was the Iridium GO! Exec. After a solid week of trying (30 to 40 hours) and countless communications with the supplier, Bill, Sharon and I agreed it was time to throw in the towel. The Iridium GO! Exec and Predict Wind Data Hub are new products in the past 30 to 45 days and claimed 40x the speed of the old Iridium GO. We had solved all the issues up to sending and receiving emails – made it work once on Friday night, then on Saturday when we tried to repeat the exercise – nothing. The issue is that the documentation is mostly non-existent and online (along with help chats) so the moment we set sail we have no fallback.

We package up the IridiumGO! Exec and pulled outthe original (but slow) Iridium GO. Within 15 minutes we had activated a subscription and Bill and I had it successfully registered it, sent emails and TXT messages and were downloading weather files. On a 3 week passage, reliability is more important than speed!

A far more melancholy disappearing act occurred on my beach walk this morning. Another nest of Olive Ridley sea turtles had hatched overnight (same location as before) and there were baby turtle tracks over a good section of the beach. Unfortunately the vast majority could be seen to stop suddenly and a set of bird tracks to be at the exact same endpoint. I also found a number of carcasses.

It was very disturbing how many of the tracks went, not towards the sea, but towards the resort buildings – at least half I would guess or more. Hatchlings have an instinctive response to travel down towards (moonlit) beaches and the sea. Often the other direction was forests and dark. Unfortunately bright hotel lights lead them astray and they burn what energy reserves they have going the wrong way. Unfortunately I found little evidence of any tracks making it across the beach to the sea.

We did find a handful of survivors and help shepherd them to the sea (with the sun up less confusion about direction but still some). Who would have believed that it might now be a survival trait to sleep in and avoid the carnage of your siblings? Of course that is a harder journey in the heat of the day and with birds still about. Hopefully a few get an escort to keep them safe for this first leg of their journey!

So unfortunately todays blog feels a little down – to much disappeared. We need to wait and see what might appear in their place!