The Floral Shop

Day 12:
Today was the final day of diving for the holiday, and I went out on a boat called the Tusa T5. This was probably the purest dive boat I was able to find, but I’d say that it wasn’t as well set up as the SilverSonic. The biggest complaint I had was that even though I was diving Nitrox, the boat wouldn’t let me dive a Nitrox profile (longer or deeper.

On these dives we were unescorted and therefore had to dive with a buddy. Since I was alone on the boat, I got paired up with a stranger. My dive buddy was named Rob and he’d been diving for 20 years. He was a great guy, and a very good diver.

The first two dives were pretty mediocre, although it was fun to dive without an escort again. The final dive though was one of the two or three best dives of my entire life.

We dropped onto Hastings Reef at a dive site called The Fish Bowl. The dive profile is to run along an outside wall for a bit, and then follow a trench into a center bowl. When we entered the bowl it was unbelievable. I’ve been amazed every dive by how alive the coral was, but it’s been nothing compared to this.

Imagine walking into a floral shop in full bloom and you can kind of get an idea of what it was like. There were hard and soft corals as far as the eye could see in an area as large as a football field. There were corals of every single color of the rainbow and there it was so dense, you never saw the sand bottom anywhere. There were also a ton of giant clams more than a meter in length. I wouldn’t call it The Fish Bowl as there weren’t really many fish, but it was awesome nonetheless.

Jill Update:
Jill went out on an all-day tour, so by the time she got home, she was exhausted. She was so tired, she didn’t even want to fight with me. Result!