Today a scheduled to interview with a photographer was cancelled because of the weather. We had planned that I would tag along on the photographer’s photo shoot to get a sense of their particular esthetic before profiling them in my book of artists working on the island. Since rain fell intermittently and the clouds threatened for much of the day, going to the beach also looked like a tenuous plan. But we were going to go somewhere. When we got into the car I still didn’t know quite where we were headed.
A few days earlier the kids and I had met a man fishing from a doc with a hand thrown net. We got to chatting. I showed him the fish my daughter caught. He told me that he rarely fished with a net this way from docks, and that he much preferred to fish in fresh water in Potworks Dam or one of the few other bodies of few water in Antigua. I know that the freshwater creatures in Antigua are undocumented but I hoped that their natural history might be kept verbally. I asked him whether he had ever seen a freshwater turtle such as the one I had seen in country pond over thirty years ago. He said that he hadn’t and that the only fish he had caught there were a species he called “cally”.
I decided to head towards Potworks Dam to take a look at it, and then to head on to whatever beach we might find for the kids to play on. When we got to Potworks Dam we stood on a lookout deck overlooking the pond. My daughter soon found what looked like a monarch butterfly. We then found a fisherman who had caught a few of these cally. They were about the size of north American sunfish but with different fin shape and slightly different coloration. I wondered if they might be a species of African cichlid introduced here at some point. The fisherman said he had never heard of freshwater turtles in Antigua either, and that the only fish he knew of that lived in these waters were cally, gourami, guppies, and freshwater eels. The rain threatened again so we moved on.
The Potworks reservoir is the largest body of fresh water in Antigua.
This is the fish that the locals call cally. It is one of the few species that can be caught in the fresh water of Potworks Dam.
Anisa called this butterly a Monarch. I wasn't sure whether it was just a Monarch look-alike. But I was able to confirm that Monarch Butterflies do live on the island.
We next found a dried up pond overgrown with some broad leafed and brilliantly flowering plant. From the shape of the leaves it definitely did not look like the water lilies that I had planted in the water garden I once had in Toronto. We took a picture of the flowers. The petals were so large they blew back and forth like leaves. Flitting around the pond we saw a tan colored butterfly with a bluish tint and spots on it. I took a picture of this one as well … hoping to identify it later.
One flower among the pond of flowers that caught our eyes.
My eyes were decieved. Watching these butterflies fluttering I would have described their spots as blue bordered with brown but pictures don't lie.
I should mention that I was a little preoccupied at times today because my laptop had repeatedly failed to start today because of what appeared to be a serious hardware error. Suffice it to say that creatively at least, there is very little that I don’t depend on my laptop for. In between the moments of rain and the moments of our little adventures these thoughts would take over. Eventually I had to confess to myself that I had no clue where I was. I couldn’t say I was lost because I knew how to retrace my steps back, but I definitely had no clue where we were. That didn’t stop where we were from being interesting. A small dirt road branched off from the road we were on. The road led past a small two story house overlooking a field and then curved off past the bend of a slight hill. I could not begin to imagine where that road went. Though I was completely lost, I was exactly where I wanted to be. We followed the road and took pictures.
Jutting out of the farm fields stood a house that was more like a sentry station.
These grasses were face level to me but towered above Eric in this photo he took.
Eventually today we followed the curve of the land downwards towards the sea to find a beach in an area not far from Freetown. The landscape around the beach was like a barren salt flat. It was different from any we have yet seen here. The beach wasn’t a nice one, but the sight of it like the rest of the day was memorable.
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