Current Rock of Residence:
Cayman Brac, Cayman Islands
Island Girl Since:
2010
Originally Hails From:
Miami, Florida
Approaching three years on the Sister Islands of the Cayman Islands (nearly two on Little Cayman and one on Cayman Brac), Roxane is rapidly approaching the point of no return to reality. While thankful to not be on Grand Cayman, where cruise ships spill out tidal waves of tourists and KFC’s get held up by machete-wielding locals demanding buckets of chicken, she has found that the Sister Islands function on a completely different level of quirky. Although she has a Master’s degree in marine biology (despite Murphy’s Law of power outages), she spends her working time doing SCUBA instruction or divemastering, chasing people and fish with her cameras, killing and cooking lionfish, and filling in as “dive shop girl”. When not working, she is likely still diving and chasing fish with cameras or spears, but, for good measure, has a few other hobbies such as: coming up with sarcastic answers to dumb tourist questions, creatively cursing her persistently failing internet service, denying that her red hair is getting blonder, desperately coveting her dwindling stash of chocolate croissants, and gathering inspiration from her longtime boyfriend, who is fond of delightfully hare-brained concepts like strapping SCUBA tanks to a tricycle to propel himself underwater (it failed, but bandaids were on hand, just in case).
Explore posts by this writer:
Island Ingenuity: Christmas Edition
'Twas three weeks before Christmas with family arriving, when I sought holiday décor to enjoy when not diving. All through the island, not a tree was in stock; the supplier had cancelled, to my open-mouthed shock. “No tree?!” I cried, and said to myself,...
Deadly Island Car Syndrome
Blink, blink. My car clicks at me as I drive into the early morning sun. I turn the blinker off. Blink, blink, it insists, clicking back on. Again, I turn it off. BLINK, BLINK, it shouts, demanding attention. I think my car is trying to tell me something. Something...
Island-Blind
I have writer’s block. Or, at least this is what I’m telling myself. Because the alternative is admitting that I’ve completely accepted the oddities of island life. In turn, this means that I no longer think of things like cannibalistic chickens eating KFC or...
Sick on a Rock
It’s midsummer with a heat index of 104°F, so I knew something must be wrong when I climbed into bed wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt. Even more so when I woke up still wearing them, since typically our A/C likes to reset itself at odd hours in the wee morning to...
An Island Girl’s Best Friend(s)
I was halfway through my 479th boat briefing when I realized that one of my new divers, a girl on the port side, was looking way too comfortable, snuggled into a stranger’s dive gear with her sunglasses on. She clearly thought that her “sunnies” were the perfect...
My Sudden Island-Wide Popularity
I suddenly have a lot of new friends on my rock. It's hard not to feel popular, what with all the personal phone calls coming into the dive shop just for me. Though in reality, the calls are from people looking not for SCUBA appointments, not for me, but for my dill....
