Despite it being Friday the 13th and a full moon we scheduled a dive for today. Guess we want to live dangerously.
This morning we had scheduled a dive boat to pick us up on the boats at 7am. So we got up early and got ready. At 7:45 they arrived. Why is it we continue to act like folks here in Central America will be on time anyway?
The water temperature here in the bay where we are anchored is 88.5 degrees. We figured it would be a bit cooler at the Santa Catalina Islands dive site - but not by much. We did two dives - one hour each. Melissa managed to not be the one to run out of air first. In fact the dive master ran out first. A small victory as she is typically the first one out of air! There were lots of colorful fish to see along with a couple of white tipped reef sharks. Including two baby sharks tucked into a small crack in the rocks.
This is Melissa descending down:
And here is Dave:
The highlight was when Melissa spotted an octopus. Its the first one we've seen in the wild. Melissa started yelling (which does no good underwater) and then thrashing about waving her arms. Much to her dismay no one looked back at her. So she finally swam and grabbed Mike's fin to get his attention and then everyone came to see it. Holly had an underwater camera and managed to capture some video of the little guy. The hand you see poking him is Mike's. And there's also some footage of an eel we saw too.
Melissa was super excited when she found a second octopus. This time grabbing Holly's fin to alert her as to the creature's location. Melissa was hopping up and down when we got back to the dive boat about having spotted not one but two octopus. That is till Mike told her that he saw four of them. Like, wow!