Cruise day 3: Coco Cay

Glorious day three of a dream come true vacation. This is the day that I got crispy fried... but I'm getting ahead of myself. Here's a picture of the island. The ENTIRE island. It took us 15 minutes to walk the length of it. It's privately owned by the Royal Caribbean cruise line. There are no "locals", but it's still in the Bahamas and I loved every minute of it. Palm trees, lounge chairs and hammocks, white, soft sand, and beautiful aqua water full of marine life for us to explore. There's no dock on the island so we had to ferry to it.
The captain's announcements that morning informed us that the weather (being hurricane season we were all listening to his weather announcements) was 40% for isolated showers. Yeah, I would call this isolated! And that's all we saw of "weather".
Sand paddles for wheel chairs :)
Another straight out of a dream day.
The water was full of jelly fish. I later learned from my mom (who learned from a few years of living in Hawaii) that jelly fish come out a few days before the full moon. Which is exactly the timing of our trip. The "locals" (or cruise employees if you rather ha ha) told us that this type of jelly fish was pretty harmless. It would feel like a bee sting and itch for about 45 minutes and that was it. So into the ocean we went with snorkel gear in tow, and we swam with the jelly fish.
Can you see it there in the middle of the pic?

And there, right in front of West's shoulder?
And here right in front of my face? They made me a bit nervous.
Hell, screw swimming with them, we down right man-handled them.
And thus none of us made it out of the end of the day with out several encounters and stings from the ever present jelly fish. They were EVERYWHERE. We came to the conclusion that the snorkel bay is definitely staged. They had a small sunken boat and a plane wreck for us to dive around, as well as some cannon wall. And the sea life was abundant, so we're sure they must lure them in somehow, but as far as that goes we didn't really care. It was still the ocean, and it was still real ocean life. And we were really swimming with it.
This school of fish surrounded us and followed us everywhere. They took us on as their "exchange students".
West wanted to "fly" the plane, but it was so easy to float in this water, that he had a hard time pulling himself down into it. See the tiny amazingly blue fish in the bottom right corner? It's the cutest thing I've ever seen.
And in contrast this fish was freakishly huge.
I was trying to take a picture of this open shell wedged into the reef but the waves started knocking me around so it didn't come out very good. We took a break from snorkeling for a drink on the beach. I could live like this forever. I really could. I think this is Megan and me. Or Ashley and me? But this one is Ashley and me with Megan popping up in the back (see? They do that LOL).This fish followed this string ray the entire time. A very cool green starfish. This conch shell had something living in it, it was crawling across the floor of the ocean. Of course we couldn't let it be. We were back on the ship by 3:30 so we could start heading to Key West. We took a very long showers, and a very long nap, and hit the karaoke scene after dinner. What do you do when you're bored? Take pictures of yourselves. Though the gay guy, Richie, who sang very fem power songs and called us girls "fellas" was quite entertaining. *kiss kiss* on the cheek fellas... Yeah, I'm not a fella, Richie. But we were laughing too hard to care. This boy gets up and sings Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean", while is little brother break danced and mooned walked on the floor. And then they convince their mom to get up and sing "We are family" while all the kids danced. It was hilarious. After karaoke (where we were all to chicken to actually join in, though I promise next time I'm just going to do it) we watched ice sculpting done at the pool and grabbed some good late evening snacks at a pool side buffet. They were playing music and teaching dances, and Wess FINALLY got to hear "Welcome to Miami". We crashed on deck chairs in front of the railings with our plates and watched the water pass by. We were zapped and sun burnt (OK, only I was sun burnt) and half asleep as we sat there in the cool breeze, so we finally called it a night.