Today was our first full day of diving, three scheduled and kept dives. I had hoped for an early morning dive, but that was not to be, sadly. Oh well, there are more days in the dive trip ahead of us, so I can expect that have at least one or two sunrise dives.
I woke up to the smell of bacon in the air - always a good thing first thing in the morning! Our breakfast buffet presented us with some scrambled eggs, done with a goat cheese and some tomatoes. And good Irish cut steel oatmeal. I have to see if there is any peanut butter on board!
Our first dive was at just before 10 am, we were guided by Philippa at Angelfish Rock. Theoretically, we should have seen a number of angelfish there, and we did see some French angelfish and rock beauties. Not nearly as many or as varied as I would have expected. We also saw a spotted moray and a chain moray, adult and juvenile blue tang, a small number of flamingo tongues, and BIG bugs everywhere. Taking just one would feed about half the guests onboard ship. There was a lot of current, and we swam right into it, so we definitely worked off breakfast, and were on our way to working off lunch.
Dive 2 was at Wayne’s self professed favorite dive site from his first visit here: Indians. We set out on a self guided tour of the rocks, giving wide berth to the larger group diving in front of us. We were happy to be given that much leeway in setting up our dive, and we were treated to more flamingo tongues, syphyraena barracuda (what we would call a Heller’s barracuda in Hawaii), horned helmets, conch (although I later learned that conch and horned helmets are synonymous down here), scrawled cowfish, rock beauty angelfish, lizardfish, and glassy sweepers. I even found a cleaner shrimp to give me a manicure!
Our third dive of the day was sort of self guided; we followed significantly behind the larger group once again. We saw many beautiful french angelfish, another chain moray, a ghost crab, several jellyfish, and lots of bugs. And one unidentified nudibranch that actually was a sea slug (a lettuce sea slug to be precise).
Wayne wanted to do some kayaking between the first and second dive, but I begged off because of the amount of direct sunlight.
As of the writing of this blog, I haven’t logged any of the first four dives yet since we arrived! I will do so shortly. We spent the night (with the super moon) outside Pirate’s Bight on Norman Island. I have some great memories from our trip here in January 2010, and shared a photo of the site on Facebook with Fern, Maria and Tracy. Happy days.
Even at only 3 dives today, the day seems so full. We are really enjoying this trip with Matt and Jodi, and Cuan Law. Her crew is really customer service oriented, at least thus far.
Good night all!
