St Croix Trip Report with link to pictures, including sting rays that might be mating

Recently returned from a week at St Croix. Dove the pier 3 days with Nep2une Divers using a private guide. Their guide service was wonderful. I highly recommend Jenny. It was a family vacation with only me diving so my dives were limited to three days. Water was 80°F and very nice. A fair amount of sand etc in the water so photos often have considerable back scatter. Green turtles were present on all dives, about 6-10 per dive on all dives. Turtles and Southern Sting rays were very relaxed around us and allowed getting within a few feet with no concern.  I could have touched turtles and rays that were on/in the sand they were so close at times but I did not touch any of them.  Same with feather dusters which did not retract even with my strobes lighting them up.  Schools of fish were present but were not as friendly as I found at the salt pier at Bonaire last May. They did not run away but tended to keep a distance that was too far for any really good photos. But there were various fish available for photos as you can see.

Link to photos from this trip.  There are 31 photos from this trip shown

We came across a male and female stingray performing their mating ritual according to what I find online. Below is a link to the first of 8 photos of the stingrays. The much smaller male bits the wing of the larger female. In the two photos with a diver in them, the female's wing edge is raised which gives the male access to mate with her so those two shots might be of them actually mating. I welcome comments about this from anyone with more knowledge about it as I am certainly no stingray expert.

Link to first of 8 photos of StingRays in their mating ritual.  Two Photos with a diver in them perhaps depict the StingRays actually mating.  No way to be certain.

This was my first diving trip with my new camera system. I used an Olympus E-M10 Mark IV camera with the 14-42 f3.5-5.6 lens on 2 of the dives. I used the octopus housing. I tried the 30mm macro lens for one dive which tended to hunt and focus too slowly for my taste and photography. I used two Backscatter MF2 strobes. I much prefer my old system, a Nikon D7000 in a Nauticam housing with Inon Z-330 strobes but I moved down in weight and size which was nice.  I will continue to use the new system and likely get better with it.

We Stayed in a VRBO condo near Christiansted in Condo Row.  It had a beach but had small sharp rocks in the sand so shoes were required to walk the beach.  No fish in the water by the condo.

One non-diver in our group took a guided snorkel tour around the pier and liked it a lot.  Cane Bay supplied the guide for that tour.

Good to have a phone to give you directions to/from places as there are few road signs.  One of our group had a T-Mobile phone and that had good connections in nearly 100% of all locations.  It never left let us down no mater where we went.  The few times it lost a signal were for short enough distances that it did not matter.

 Comments are welcome.