Yesterday we did our first boat dive. We went North to Peter's Pillars (about 10 min boat ride). We dove for about an hour overall. Drew and I saw an Eagle Ray about 5 minutes into the dive. We also saw our first barracuda who was maybe a foot long, not nearly as big as some of the ones we've seen in the Keys. I'm okay with that though. We also saw two sea turtles again. This time one was sleeping on the bottom with a remoray laying on top of him and other that was just swimming along. Again it was a lot of the big, round orange corals and the long purple tubes. We also saw some large fan corals that were 2-3 ft tall. It was a little overcast when we first got in the water but cleared up once we were down. Because it was a little stormy at the beginning the fish were all hanging out in schools together.
Mom and I went over to the pool for a little while to read and catch some sun. After that, the rest of the family decided to drive to Angels 2 and do a shore dive. I was tired from the sun and hot so I opted to stay at the Habitat. They werent overly impressed with the dive there, so I lucked out a little. For dinner, they had a barbeque buffet. We had the later seating and had a very pleasent meal. They had two types of chicken, pork kebabs, wahoo, tuna tartar, pasta salad, potato salad, pumpkin soup, grilled veggies, and a couple salads. We had a nice long meal, but still had 2 hours before midnight, so we went back to the room to play a couple hands of cards before heading over to the bar for fireworks and champagne. We went back over around 11:15 and enjoyed drinks, chatting and listening to music. At midnight they shot off a whole firework display off of the dock. I think ours was the longest and pretties display, although we could see various ones up and down the coast line.
This morning we slept in a little. Around 11 we drove over to the village to walk around, but when we got over there, pretty much everything was closed so we drove down the south part of the coast instead. We passed the salt fields which were pretty cool. The pools are different colors depending on the salinity and it looked like white foam on the edges. We also passed a ton of dive sites that are just off of the road. They're marked by little yellow rocks with the site's name on it.
We did two boat dives this afternoon, Captain Don's Reef and 18 Palms. 18 Palms was very cool. It's a double reef with one starting at 20 ft and the other starting at around 90ft. We saw several eels, BIG barracuda, a school of 10 tarpon, and some of the best coral so far. Two back to back dives in tiring though. For dinner we went into town to It's Raining Fish and had a very nice evening.
USC won our bowl game today as well! Now we're just hanging out and watching football and relaxing. More diving tomorrow.
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