I'm going to be a dive bum forever
Woke up at 530 to see the sunrise must mostly because the crew woke me up (and Andy). It’s OK, I’m on vacation and I don’t need to sleep anyway. I headed up to the sundeck and I saw a locus (grillo sp? en Español) and I though aww how cute. Then the dude pointed to the hundreds of them on the fridge and all over the deck. I was not cool with this. I tried to walk by them and then they started jumping. I was freaking a bit. Then the dude started hosing them off and they started attacking us. He stopped but I was uncomfortable with them jumping on me, and it’s not easy to get them off. They also pooped everywhere. One smacked Andy in the eye really hard. The sun had risen and it was time for me to get out of here. Back to my nice air-conditioned room for some coffee to enjoy the ride to Bartolomeu. Breakfast consisted of scrambled eggs, bread, fruit, yogurt and fresh papaya juice- we had a different fresh squeezed juice every day for breakfast!
Now it was time for the first real dive. We saw Manta Rays, Golden Rays, Sting Rays, Eagle Rays, a huge Scorpion Fish, Tripplefin Blenny’s, and two sea turtles. The group was pointing to a crab that I couldn’t see. When they swam away I stayed to try to see the crab and all of a sudden I saw a huge object moving. I thought that was the largest crab in the world! In face it was a sea turtle! It swam away and a dude from Columbia followed it in pursuit. Toward the end of the dive I was in the back like usual, I turned around and a turtle was following me. I couldn’t believe it, I just stared at it in awe. Others then noticed it and it swam away. Andy and I were the last ones standing so the DM swam around with us until I had 400 psi left, that’s when we saw the Scorpion Fish and the Sting Ray on the bottom of the ocean floor.
We got out for a bit, had fruit, then prepared for our second and last dive of the day. This was an exploration dive since the DM never went to this dive site before. We jumped in and swam down a wall. Not long into the dive we spotted 3 white tip sharks sleeping in a cave. We came up to them from behind, I had a perfect view for once. As soon as they noticed we were there they took off- Andy got it all on video. We hung around the reef for a bit waiting for them to come back. I got distracted by a Trumpetfish so I started to follow it down the wall. Then the DM rang the bell which got my attention to then notice the larger white tip shark heading straight for me. I got the hell out of the way and apparently almost knocked Andy’s reg out of his mouth. It was amazing. Two of the three sharks came and went a couple times, probably not happy we woke them up. We then left and found a huge school of barracuda. They formed a dark cloud in the water. I was surprised how slowly they moved. They were so close I could almost touch them. I also broke 1K diving minutes on this fabulous dive.
Lunch was delish. We sat on the sundeck, took naps, and headed for Wolf Island the rest of the afternoon until we reach it in the morning. It’s 140 miles and we’re going 8.6 knots. We gazes at the stars for a bit, admiring the Milky Way and all the stars we can’t normally see. Tomorrow is supposed to be even more incredible than today.