After all the rushing around of the last week it was great to get a bit of a lie-in and wake up to the relaxing sound of nothingness. Key West is not the kind of place to be in a hurry, so we lounged around the pool soaking up the morning sun like the lizards in the garden around us before going our separate ways. I dropped Jim and Sue off to do some shopping and got myself down to the local internet cafe for my badly-needed internet fix, washed down with an iced tropical coffee packed full of coconut, vanilla and sunshine while the wild chickens pecked around in the dirt at my feet.
My main mission was to find out why the DVD drive on my shiny new Apple PowerBook only burns at 2x rather than the advertised 8x. Why do I care, you might ask? Well, for the last week Jim’s been marching around with my camcorder glued to his face, recording everything around him including Sue and me. Since he hasn’t got anything to play the tapes on at home I’ve been burning his footage to DVD so he can load it into his Mac and edit it, but at just 2x it’s a painful process. Each 60 minute tape needs 3 DVDs, and each DVD takes 45 minutes to burn, plus the hour it takes to get the tape onto my Mac in the first place. Since he’s using a tape every day it means I’ve been up till 2am most nights trying to keep up with him.
Google revealed the answer in seconds – the drive used in the PowerBook is very sensitive and will only burn at full speed on high-quality media certified to 8x, so the Memorex and TDK discs I’ve tried haven’t made the grade and have therefore been limited to 2x burn speeds. Armed with this information I drove round Key West in search of the recommended brands (Maxell, Apple, Fuji or Verbatim) but all to no avail, so it looks like I’m stuck with more late nights.
After a quick lunch back at the Sea Isle and a little bit of Perl programming (just to keep my hand in) Jim and Sue returned from their shopping, and we all set off to the docks to go on a dolphin-watching and snorkeling cruise. This turned out to be an excellent jaunt, with the promised dolphins appearing more or less where they were supposed to be. I now have dozens of pictures of ripples where they’d just submerged and just one or two where I actually managed to catch them on the surface.
Dolphins off Key West
After a while we left the dolphins alone and our skipper (Gary) and first mate (Courtney) deftly steered us onto a nearby reef where they chucked us into the water to look at the fish. We weren’t disappointed as there were hundreds of the things down there, in all sorts of shapes and sizes from teeny weeny minnowy things to worryingly large specimens with rather too many teeth for my liking. Some must have been nearly as big as me, but it’s hard to judge size underwater so they might actually have been tiddlers. Jim spotted a large ray glide by on the bottom, probably around a metre or so across the wings, and I tried to catch it but it just sneered at me and sped away into the clear blue water.
We arrived back at the dock in time to wander round to Mallory Square for the sunset celebration which I was pleased to see was as tacky as ever. Needless to say Jim filmed it all, so I can look forward to seeing it all again when I burn it to DVD tonight. Oh joy.
After the sun had dipped below the horizon we headed back down Duval Street for Jim and Sue’s final dinner in America, which we had in Mangoes. Reg and I found this place 2 weeks ago and can highly recommend it – great food and friendly service. Try to get a table in the peaceful rear garden if you can, and you’ll dine next to a wonderful old mangrove tree with air plants hanging from it’s gnarled tendrils.