Spay we can, in Roatan!: Good bye to Harmony, More Diving!

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

HaHa, after an “early night” I woke up at 3:45 (!!!) to finish my studies. Crazy.

We had to say good bye to Harmony this am. She has a long flight to get back home to Hong Kong. It will take her about two days to get home. She is currently on “summer” break at vet school and gets to spend some time at home before continuing her studies in New Zealand. She is a great young lady and will do well in her career.

Our first dive this morning was the wreck dive!!! That is one I was really looking forward to! We went down to 100 feet at “El Aguila” (The Eagle) and saw a cargo ship that has been down for about 20 years. It is so cool how it slowly appears, like it is coming out of the mist. There was a green eel that swam around with us!! We also saw a giant crab and lots of garden eels. The fish were beautiful.

Remember: All these underwater pics are from the internet, not our photos. But they do show what we saw!

These are what the little "garden eels" look like. When you get close, they duck into the sand. The photos below must be with nice underwater telephoto lenses... I never saw the little guys up close enough to see their cute faces!

Lobster!!

Yes, the green eel really did come out to swim with us!

As a kid we would see them at the Script's Aquarium, peaking out of rocks like the one in the picture below.

We saw a lot of groupers. They get really big.

We had to take the boat back to the dock to pick up some folks from the cruise ships for more diving. We were scheduled to do our final adventure dive: navigation. We had several tasks to complete: compass navigation in a straight line out and back, as well as navigating a square 100 feet on each leg on an initial heading that Tom gave each of us prior to our test. It was a bit challenging and stressful but we all did well.

We saw "porcupine fish" and "puffers". I don't know how to tell the difference.

More fun diving after that at the site “The Wife” where we were down to 49 feet for 63 minutes. Sandy and I have really improved the control of our breathing under water and are able to stay down for pretty long periods! And we saw a nurse shark!!

We are now “Advanced Open Water Divers”!

Spotted Drum Fish. These are very small fish but beautiful to see. They often are hiding in between rocks.

After lunch we went back to our bungalow and took a much deserved nap. We checked with Seagrape dive shop and they were planning to go out on a night dive because the weather was holding. So we signed up for that!

We went out with Cleve to “Dixie’s Place” for a wonderful night dive. It was great weather. Linda went along. Also George, and gentleman on holiday from his tech job in Alberta, Canada. We saw another octopus and other great sealife. Also, more bio-luminescence. Wow!