Well, not really. Spent Sunday on the all day trip down to dive Lembeh Strait, famous for muck diving. Never done that, so figured you gotta check out what any restaurant is famous for. Boarded the sturdy wooden boat with 4 german and 2 italian divers as well as two divemasters and 3 men running the boat and gear. Spent a nice hour and a half cruising to our destination, with yours truly perched on the bow listening to Tay’s and my favorite podcaster, Mr. Dan Savage. As always, plenty of laughs and exclamations from the listener. Arrived, suited up and took the plunge. Usually scuba divers go in search of the largest variety of brightly colored and shaped corals, fish and other undersea life. However, you probably don’t know that muck diving is basically combing the dark sandy ocean floor for strange and wonderful bottom dwelling creatures. And we saw quite a few of those. I will say that by the third dive, it was enough for me, but in for a penny, in for a pound. Anyway, after getting the dive briefing, we take our giant strides into the water and head down. We’ve been shown on a little dry erase board drawn on by the divemasters what route we’ll be taking and we’re told that we will cover the area with a zigzag pattern, to try and cover the most ground. Nikko, the divemaster for my group of 3 (I was lucky enough to be with the Italians, Leonardo!), used a 3 foot long slender metal rod to turn things over, gently rub against lines and anemones, etc, to see what kind of teeny tiny shrimp or whatever might come out of hiding. He was kind enough to give me his smaller one, so I could do some poking and prodding to pass the time. Saw a 4-inch long seahorse just trucking across the sand. Really, how does he or she do it? No fins, no legs, no motor or sail, just moving along with his slender tail behind him. Kind of like a little dinosaur. Stonefish, cuttlefish, royal blue shrimp, a tiny seahorse that I could barely see and a crocodile fish. There were sporadic anenome growths, each defended by some aggressive little mothers – the clown fish. Nikko came within about 4 feet of one and the little bugger nipped at his mask. Funny! But I have to say that without a doubt, far and away, my favorite weird creature is the frogfish. OMG!!! We saw them in all sizes. You HAVE to look up a picture of this dude. Is if a fish? Doesn’t swim. Is it a frog? Doesn’t hop or ribbit (although my oldest has and he’s not a frog either). It has 4 fin things that actually are used like feet. We saw a cute brown frogfish probably about 3 inches by 3 inches and it was walking along the sand – really -walking. And we even saw it fling out its little single antenna from the top of its head, with the little built-in lure, and wave it around to try and catch some tasty morsel. As Wallace Shawn might say (in which movie?): Inconceivable!! You can’t believe it unless you see it. When we found some baby frogfish, they were like little pieces of seaweed – I don’t know how the divemasters find this stuff, but I guess it’s practice. A scorpionfish lying among broken colored coral was the same color as the coral and wedged right in the mess. The only way you could see it was because of the eye. But I digress. Also saw a giant green frogfish on two different occasions, and both times dude was parked in between a couple of wings of coral, and his hands were to either side of him holding on, wedged with pressure against the smooth coral surface, just like Dave Wolf taking a break while climbing through a big split in the rock (I’m sure there’s some terminology to describe that so will fill in later). I just hung in the water and stared because it was so unreal. Gave a woman my email address to see if she’ll email me the picture. If so, I’ll post it right into this entry. Raining like hell during lunchtime, while we huddled in the covered room, but down to a drizzle for the third dive. As I said, not as much seen on that one, and I think I had had enough, but I’ve done it and it was cool. Back to mad teeming bright life for me tomorrow!