Friday morning's first dive was the "Captain's Special", meaning "extra early" at 6am. The crew woke us up with coffee and water on a tray delivered to our room, very nice. We went down to the dive deck and suited up, the dive site was called Dos Cocos. We jumped in and swam around for a while seeing a nice variety of fish, many of the same ones we'd seen during the week. After about half and hour Rick was a bit cold, so we decided to head in. We decided that would be our last dive, so we dried off, got dressed and went in for a great breakfast of waffles and eggs.

Hogfish on some coral

Red Hind

Ocean Surgeonfish

Banded Butterflyfish

After settling up with the captain we started to break down the camera gear and get everything dried off. Fred went back in for the second dive with Chris and ended up seeing a green moray and yet another octopus. Fred had definitely had an eventful week, and he got his advanced open water and nitrox certifications to boot! After the last divers were out of the water, the boat headed back for Belize City. We had winds following us most of the way, the boat was rolling gently as we cruised along. Just before we docked we saw a huge cruise ship, everyone was very glad to be on our mini-cruise ship instead!

Trumpetfish

Tons of Yellowtails!

Tiny island all by itself

Ruins at Altun Ha

At the dock we had hired a driver to take us inland to Altun Ha, an ancient Mayan ruin. The ride there took about an hour, with a few stops along the way where our driver showed us some native cashews, an alligator pond and the leaves of a plant that were like sand paper. The road conditions were pretty bad much of the way, and the living conditions we saw along the way were quite bad. Many of the houses looked like they were just barely held together. Arriving at the ruin site, we found that we were the only ones there. Apparently there had been about a hundred cruise ship passengers there earlier, but they had left a few hours before. The site was in pretty good condition, though much of it looked like it had been reconstructed, without necessarily sticking strictly to the original building materials. It was still interesting to climb up to the top of a couple of the structures and take pictures.

We arrived back at the boat just after 5pm, just enough time for Randy to finish up the captain's report for Sam and to get ready for the cocktail party on the sun deck. About half of the passengers attended, the rest were at Jagwa-Pa doing cave tubing. We talked with the crew and got ideas for future dive trips, complimenting them on a great job during the week. Afterwards we walked through the Radisson to the Harbour View restaurant were we had a delicious dinner sitting at the edge of the water. Then we headed back to the boat for our last night aboard.