Our last two days consisted of two-tank morning dives, lazy buffet lunches and restful afternoons. On Wednesday, we did a sandy bottom dive – looking for frogfish (found two babies, but enthralled watching one walk along the coral), stonefish, cuttle fish (none) and whatever unusual sights might appear. Very low visibility at the top, but a bit better at the bottom. Thursday we did a dive of a sloping reef, and about halfway through ran into a very strong current. Instead of heading straight into it (I was kicking and only staying in place. Only good thing about that was the exercise!), we curved around to the left and headed back along the reef over on that side. The current was moving quite quickly, and I thought I’d go flying past Maety (our dive master) and Lance, so I positioned myself right along side of him so he’d act like a wall to keep me from flying away! He took my hand and everything was much easier after that.
Our last dive ended up being along the wall at the jetty we’d snorkeled on our first day. A calm and beautiful dive, we didn’t go deep so were enjoying everything for 75 minutes. A couple of times I looked away from the reef and found myself in the middle of a school of adolescent triggerfish and just loosened my whole body and floated along with them, enjoying the lack of gravity. I focused on the coral polyps or plankton or whatever the small bits of stuff was throughout the sea and could watch myself move up about inches when I inhaled and down the same as I exhaled. I was really in a very small world at that point, and really dug the zero gravity feeling of having every muscle in my body relaxed. Then I’d kind of “come to” and rejoin my little group. It was a lazy dive, and at one point, Lance motioned us over. All I could see was some brown seaweed beneath a coral head, but wait, there’s an eye! It was an octopus, and how he found it I’ll never know. It would change color in (yes, literally) one second, and we watched for quit a while. Even saw him/her move across the sand to retreat under a different coral. The highlight of the dive, other than the abundant life and wall of variegated coral itself. I extracted every moment from the dive, then time to surface, take a hot shower and enjoy a lazy afternoon.
Other than the outrageously cool octopus, we also sighted: adolescent and grandpa turtles, parrot, coronet, trigger, squirrel, angel, puffer, tang, mackerel, butterfly, clown and stone/scorpion fishes, blue-spotted stingray, moray eels, a wide variety of nudibranches (kind of like seaslugs with beautiful colors), coral and cleaner shrimp, teeny tiny crabs (especially liked the ones that live in a particular variety of white, bubbly soft coral), pygmy seahorses, 5 white tip adolescent sharks swimming in a big cave, shrimp fish, paper scorpionfish, pipefish, rock beauties, catfish and schools of your basic generic “fish.” So fun when they’re so plentiful that you are swimming in the underwater world that so few people experience. It’s amazing, and also sad, because the plethora of enthusiastic visitors takes its toll on the health and abundance of the reef, no matter what. Can’t wait for the next dive trip!
Keep in touch! xoxo