I can't tell if that was the 5th worst dive of my life (the first four being Nelson's Ledges, naturally), or the best.

We had class this morning, Biomes, then it was dive time. Jumped in, no problems at all equalizing, I was sinking like a stone, which seemed good. (I did lose my snorkel and have to throw it back on the boat, but whatever). However, my buoyancy was definitely negative, and I was having trouble getting it to neutral. I was content to just struggle and kick through it, but our leader kept trying to get me to inflate my BCD. Eventually he had me grab onto a coral ledge and tried to inflate it himself. Well, it wasn't until after the dive that he told me my BCD wasn't holding air at all, and I should have checked it before we jumped in. Ah, woops. So we spent most of the dive (29 m max depth, 40 mins total) hanging onto this one area of coral, just watching the area around us. I probably destroyed a fair bit of coral trying to stay in place, what with the buoyancy issues and all, but I tried to minimize my impact. Hopefully it wasn't too bad, but I felt awful about it. We didn't move until much later in the dive.

But then, it was also the best. See, we a gray reef shark. And then another one behind it. And more, and more, and more. I'm not sure if some were repeats or not, but there were at least 8 individual sightings, maybe more. The fish around us were incredible, and we even saw a school of spotted eagle rays swim by, probably about a dozen. Oh, and there was a Napoleon fish too, those things are absolutely enormous. So in that way, it was the best dive.

We eventually started moving, going out into the blue so fewer fish, I still had 50 bar but he had me breathe off his secondary for a while anyway, then I switched back to mine, switched back to his for the safety stop. The safety stop went smoothly, which was nice. Came up, got to the boat, he explained the problem to me, I felt mildly like an idiot, and back we went. But yeah, gorgeous stuff, despite the issues.

When we got back, I went up front to ask where that snorkel was... and got thrown into the water. So another extended round of throwing each other into the water occurred, though with many more students involved. The culmination of this was Mikey, John, Nate and I performing a quadruple cannonball, in which we all put our arms around each others' shoulders and tucked our legs. It was a fairly epic idea, not sure how well it panned out. Perhaps a thing to practice. I tried do a couple of Nate's backflips and... did poorly. First two just failed, next one resulted in a painful back flop, didn't try it for a while, another back flop, gave up. Ah, well.

We came in, sat a bit, I got a shower in, and then lunch. An absolutely amazing rice pilaf, chicken, papaya, those chip things, and a coke. A lot of us left our fins on the dive boat, not needing them again for the rest of the trip. I'm glad to not have to worry about them in my bag anymore. And yeah, that's about it. I'm in the room again, trying to avoid the sun, don't want to increase my chance of skin cancer anymore than I already have. We go to the island tonight at five.

Monday, February 15th, roughly 2:20-2:30 PM local time