Almost 12 hours between entries. Fun.

Even more fun? TODAY.

Headed to the docks, went out to the main boat, had a delicious breakfast with bangers (hot dogs), bread, some delicious egg thing, watermelon, and mango juice. After that was class, which as usual ranged from discussion of censorship to different ways of learning to whether or not the Maldives have any mountains (they don't, at least not above water). After class we did our checkout dive, I had some buoyancy trouble, but my ears were better by far than they've been. It's absolutely beautiful here, so many different kinds of coral, so many different fish, a turtle and a moray eel were the two most exciting parts.

We got back from that, had lunch which had the only papaya I've ever liked, chicken, green beans, rice, and a potato thing, oh and those tasty cracker things that are almost like popcorn. Then we sat around for a while, I talked to David about this that and the other thing, a lot about the Plain Dealer and how lots of the US is ridiculous (apparently, he only gets the PD for Arts & Life and hates what the paper is doing to it), from which I learned that David and my father would get along wonderfully.

Then someone got the bright idea to jump off the top of the boat, and everything went uphill from there. I did a cannonball, I did some pencil jumps, I did a front flip (apparently my head nearly hit the railing, or so they say), I did another cannonball which was deemed by many to be “the perfect cannonball,” I jumped with Nasseef, one of the Bluepeace guys, we even got a group picture in the water of all the students and Denny together. It was absolutely fantastic, we could even see some fish eating the extra rice that the cook was dumping into the water behind the boat. Swaffy and I helped Zypy out with buoyancy a bit, the whole thing was just SO much fun. We came back in, sat a bit longer, found out Saffah was at Copenhagen this last December, which is extremely cool, and then it was out for our second dive.

[EDIT at 9:20: Oh, also, John decided I was a seal because of the way I climbed up to the highest part of the boat. “Look for polar bears, it's okay, and slide up.” I'll admit, the way I used my arms to propel myself onto my stomach, and stand from there, was remarkably seal-like.]

Admittedly, I've only had 4 dives out of the US so far, but this was easily my best dive of my life so far. Not only in terms of what we saw, but also in terms of my diving, my buoyancy control and ear clearing were both better than they had EVER been. We saw the most gorgeous coral, Allen described it as a mountain, far as you could see in any direction was coral. So many fish I don't have the foggiest idea what they were or how to describe them, and some reef sharks, both black- and white-tipped. The only time I had buoyancy issues, I'm pretty sure we hit an upwelling in the current which was moving us along, and then I just dropped water and kept going. Man, that current nearly shot me to the surface though. We had to go up a little bit early, I ran through my air very quickly (maybe due to the current, which just blew us along on both dives, but was stronger on the second, maybe due to my breathing), but we still saw a lot of fantastic stuff. Went down deeper than I ever have before too, 25.8 m at my lowest. I still need to work a little on awareness: bumping into other divers, and I got tangled in one of Denny's tubes at one point, but still. Absolutely amazing, and man, is diving great when you finally are getting buoyancy down (added a weight the second time, certainly helped.)

So, yeah. The Maldives is kind of an ocean paradise. It's ridiculous how beautiful it is here. I think it was last night I was talking to one of the dive instructors about how great it must be to live here, any time you want to see a coral reef you just go out and do it, and he said “yeah. This is cold to me” kind of smirkingly, and just jumped right back in. And here I am, sitting in a lawnchair on a boat in the middle of the Indian Ocean, having SCUBA'd twice today, having eaten some of the best food of my life over the last two days (and about to again), a storm is whipping up, but slowly, with only rare rain drops and a pleasant wind, typing up my day on my netbook. If the trip can get any better than this, I'm not sure how.

Saturday, February 13th, roughly 6:30-6:45 PM local time