More Afro-Caribbean Carvings

Above the entrance to one of the bars at Anse Chastanet in St.Lucia is a memorable wood carving by Lawrence Deligny, whose work we purchased -- see Afro-Caribbean Mask from St.Lucia my post from earlier today. The images from the life of Samson in the Bible are vivid -- on our first visit to St.Lucia years ago, I watched a wood carver creating an image of Samson with dreadlocks, and he told me that allowing ones hair to grow -- as the Rastamen do -- was related to the Samson story. The bars and restaurants are decorated with many more carvings by Deligny and another artist who works in brightly painted wood.

Afro-Caribbean Mask from St.Lucia

This is the mask we brought back -- it's over 4 feet tall. We like the way it goes with our other African masks, which I wrote about here: About the New Masks and Our African Masks

The name of the artist is Lawrence Deligny, and other works of his are on display at Anse Chastenet where we stayed.

Alice and Miriam's Trip to Disney World

I'm sure they took this photo just for me! Anything for Mona Lisa, right?

An eel hunts

One more memory from St.Lucia. While snorkeling off the Anse Chastanet beach, I noticed about 10 feet below me a snake eel with his head in a hole in a coral rock, and his body whipping slowly back and forth in the open.

I watched him for a while. Occasionally, a little cloud of sand would come from one side of the hole -- as if he were smoking. He would take his head out of the hole and shake it a bit. His head was a very odd shape, pretty snaky. I realized that he was pulling some type of food out of the hole, but I could never see what it was.

Eventually, my quarry moved through another hole in the big coral formation. I saw his head go in, leaving just his tail outside the hole, and then saw his head come out of a hole on the other side of the coral. He hunted in another crevasse for a while, the same way, sometimes catching a critter which he pulled out of the hole. Eventually he snaked away.

Len took the above photo on a dive at another reef, deeper; but it's the same species of eel. I could see his spots clearly, though the one I watched didn't seem as vividly colored. His spots were closer to white rather than yellow.