Scott in Miami

Scott is in Miami this week teaching the seminar that happens each quarter. In May the seminar is going to be in Atlanta and Scott's brother Kevin is going to be helping. It is the first time we will do the seminar somewhere other than Miami and we are excited about the change and possibilities for future seminars in other seminars. Not a lot has been happening in Cayman this past few weeks which explains the lack of posting. We are not experiencing the weather that everyone else is going through and while many of you will laugh at us for it, we kind of wish we could. We are really getting into the exercise and both are feeling a lot better about ourselves though last week Scott had a setback (he always does when his father is on Island and he has the chance to cheat by getting Wendy's when John does). Katie is hard at work on her Master degree and now that she isn't working full time is focusing on doing more classes quicker. She is on pace now to finish the degree early next year.

Flying Gurnard Fish

This morning we went swimming again to help Scott exercise his back in a low impact workout. We went back to Eden Rock-Devil's Grotto because it is a great place to swim laps. While swimming her first lap Katie came across a very unfamiliar species. At first we weren't sure if it was a fish or a reef creature. It appeared to be walking on the bottom but also had fins. We watched it for a while taking a bunch of pictures and a video. When we got home we pulled out our Reef Fish Identification book and were able to identify the species as a Flying Gurnard. Flying Gurnards "walk" on their ventral fins and use the spines of their pectoral fins almost like hands to turn over rocks, which you can see happening in the video below. Their pectoral fins look like wings and in the video you can see this one spread its fin out at one point though not to its full extent. The edge of those fins is rimmed in bright blue lines and dots. The book identifies them as shy but this one wasn't at all. The species is uncommon in the Caribbean and it was a rare treat to find one.

Final Table

This evening Scott stayed home from work because he foolishly decided he would try and move some fireproof filing cabinets at the college yesterday and strained his back. Since he was bored, he logged into an online poker site and played in a RAZZ tournament with 1,012 other players. RAZZ is a game where the object is to get the lowest hand instead of the highest like in regular poker. In the past the highest he's finished in any tournament has been in the teens. He had never made a final table. Tonight things broke his way and after four hours of playing, Scott made his first final table for an online card tournament.

There were 8 players who made the final table and Scott made it all the way through the final table to heads up with a player from Spain. When they began heads up play, the player from Spain had about 1.1 million chips and Scott had about 800,000 chips. They played heads up for almost 45 minutes. Scott won a big hand early and took the chip lead then slowly ground his way to about a 500,000 chip lead. Then another big hand seemed to cripple the Spaniard taking him down to under 200,000 chips. What followed was an amazing 30 minutes. Scott got the Spaniard all in no less than 11 times and for each of the first ten times the Spaniard survived, twice drawing out on seventh street to win the hand and double up. At one point Scott was only up about 400,000 chips having lost most of his 1.6M chip lead. After a lot of small hands, a couple of big hands for Scott got him in position to finally win. As they approached the five hour mark of play Scott finally got a monster hand against a very good hand for the other player and when the hand was finished the Spaniard had only 30,000 chips left. Two hands later it was all over and Scott had won. For his victory he got the satisfaction of ruling the online Razz world for a night on pokerstars.net, a big kiss from his wife and 17,000 play chips with which he can play in other tournaments.

Black Durgon Video

This morning we went over to the Eden Rock-Devil's Grotto site to do some swimming and got a great video of a Black Durgon feeding at Devil's Grotto.