I'm a convert. This is FUN! (actually I've done "resort dives before, so have some familiarity-we're going to certify over the holidays)

We dove to 85 feet

I had a fun day in that I got to go SCUBA diving with Orcinius and The Rose. Turns out Orcinius has an extra BCD/Regulator/Tank and they are XL and fit me like a glove (a special thanks to John and Lisa for helping me and watching after me in the water to keep things safe). Since I’ve had some training in diving over the years, I was fairly well versed in how to operate the BCD in order to descend and level off at the depth I wanted. The important part is the leveling off part. So, for today, I got to 50 feet. I didn’t want to push it, so let that be my max depth, but it was very comfortable and we’re going to dive again tomorrow, so I think I’ll go a little deeper since the bottom where we’re diving is more like 70 feet. Ann flew cover for us by snorkeling on top and towing the diver buoy so people would know we’re under water. She “encountered” a poisonous sea snake. She’s getting pretty blasé about it. Her thought: “it was pretty”.

Oh, did I say we’re diving right off the boats? It’s so beautiful right here in the mooring area. Fish, coral, (poisonous sea snakes) it’s all right here in the middle of the moorings. So, hopefully we’ll do another dive in the morning tomorrow and then in the afternoon we’ve signed up to do a “whale encounter”. Specifically it’s supposed to be swimming/snorkeling with the whales. We’ll see.

It also turned out that John made a deal on the rental car and we now have it until Friday. So, in the afternoon, we had a mission. Actually two missions. One: go back to the geo-cache spot where we left off yesterday at dusk and see if we could find the treasure. At 1600 Lisa called on the VHF. She had emailed the guy who “hid” the cache we were looking for and he responded. He confirmed we were “spot on” in our calculated position based on yesterday’s antics collecting clues all across the island, so we decided to go back with more light and see if we could find it. Yesterday we just ran out of time and light. We were climbing around the cliffs in the dark and finally decided someone was going to get hurt-so we stopped. Today with more light we hiked back down the trail to the spot near the water that the GPS said was “the place” and within five minutes found a little “cave” with a Tupperware container holding the “treasure”. OK, a little short on the treasure part, but we signed our names into the book, added a couple more treasures of our own and took a picture with all of us holding the cache. That’s two down. There are two more in Tonga and “the girls” are determined to add one of their own. They are already talking about putting it inside a sea cave that you have to swim into to find the treasure, so anyone thinking they want to follow our directions-be prepared. These ladies are TOUGH after enduring 7000 plus miles of sailing across the Pacific!

I mentioned two things- the second important thing we did today was to get Ice Cream! It’s becoming an important daily event to hit one of the two ice cream shops on the island -when they are open! They are never open when they say they are going to be, so it’s always an adventure finding the one that’s open. It’s almost as complicated as the geo-cache game. Today, we had to drive to the “other” side of the island for our fix. The one on this side was supposed to be open, but wasn’t.

Oh well, we’re definitely on “Island Time”. You just go with the flow.