Learning to care
The first time I visited Buccoo Reef in Tobago, I was 13, a precocious teen on holiday with the family. In the early sixties, travel between Trinidad and Tobago by air was still a precious event reserved for the elite or those, like us, having a first-in-a-lifetime experience. That's where the Buccoo Reef trip fitted. I remember how blue the water was - a blue reserved for the pages of magazines or posters featuring that idyllic Pigeon Point jetty like a finger pointing to the horizonless expanse of bluest blue in our two islands. At the Nylon Pool, we floated as if suspended in sky. I marvelled at the coral, white as bleached bones. I thought then, that was the natural colour of coral. At that time, some 30 years after the marine park was opened (in the 1930s) as we walked in our plastic sandals, we were cautioned not to handle any coral, not to chase the fish. Even then, there were whispers of the decay of the reef, as if touring it was a surreptitious activity, reserved ...