Wednesday 1 October – a great snorkel

Another very hot day, it was a relief to go over the reef at about midday, there was just enough tide for us to dinghy over, back to the spot they went to yesterday. Claudette, Gary and Kim all joined us. Gary brought his spear gun along which changed the the peace of snorkelling for me. He said he hadn’t been in the water for years, he doesn’t like it and is scared of sharks! He swum and dived around like crazy. However it was a great snorkel, loads of fish on the dramatic steep drop off, so steep you can’t see the bottom. The blue of the deep water is really intense. We saw lots of turtles, which is heart warming to see, as I suspect they are still hunted in these waters. Saw quite a few fish I have not seen before. Huge schools of different kinds of fish and different sizes. I find it mesmerising, there is so much activity going on it is hard to focus on any particular fish. We were out for well over an hour in the midday sun, a good way to keep cool. Kim is very gung ho, she just wears a bikini, she handles the sun well. Claudette is so skinny, she feels the cold, so always wears a little dive suit. Rowan and I wear rashies on our tops, mine is long sleeved, I like to wear as little suncream as possible, just on our faces. My legs are sun hardened now and don’t seem to burn. I don’t think sun cream does the coral any favours, even our reef friendly stuff.

The afternoon the men spent helping Claudette put epoxy on her rudder, turns out her little scrape is actually a fairly big chunk out of it. She borrowed our snuba, battery operated scuba gear, but she was struggling to get the epoxy on, so Rowan had to do it. He came back all bunged up from being upside down under the boat. They got there in the end, they will do a second cover tomorrow. She also has a bad shroud (the big metal wire tensioning rods for the mast), we just hope she makes it safely to Indonesia!

With just a few visits from various internet surfers it was an early night for us.