Tuesday morning we awoke to clear blue skies and a very calm ocean, perfect for diving! After breakfast we headed back down to the dock and boarded the Scuba II again. The Scuba Club tries to keep divers with the same boat and dive master all week. That lets the dive master get to know each person and their capabilities. With each day of diving we did a deeper dive than the previous day. The first site this morning was Palancar Caves. On the boat we had Cari and Garret, as well as two new divers, Kathy and Bob, who turned out to live right down the street from us in Los Altos! Small world!

The dive started out with a nurse shark sleeping up under a rock ledge, kind of like an ostrich with it's head in the sand. We swam through some swim-throughs and saw some soft coral, then saw a small turtle swimming around snacking. A little while later we saw a large shape coming in gracefully from the distance. It turned out to be an eagle ray, about 5 to 6 feet across. It glided by effortlessly, very cool!

Our second dive was at Punta Tunich. Once again the visibility was awesome, between 100 and 150 feet. We saw a couple of filefish, as well as a Rock Lobster!

Back at the resort we rested during the afternoon, then prepared for our night dive. We were on a different boat, the Reef Star, with a larger group of 15 people. They split us into a group of 7 and one of 8, each with our own dive master. Our dive master's nickname was 'Free Willy'; as you can guess, he was a pretty big guy! We talked with a couple, Tammy and Mark. Tammy was going down for her second night dive and was a bit nervous. We assured her not to worry, and said she should keep track of Rick, since he'd certainly find an octopus.

The dive site was called Paraiso, and was chosen since it was pretty sheltered and didn't have much current. This also meant that quite a few dive boats were doing their night dive there. We all descended and within 3 minutes Rick was flashing his light around; he had found an octopus! Everyone swam over for a look and watched until he hid under a rock. We swam around for a while, seeing a couple of rock fish and a cool ray. Then we noticed that Fred was swimming away at a pretty fast pace. We took off after him, waving our lights and banging our tanks, but he kept going. We finally caught him and weren't' sure what had happened. We tried to find our group, but when we couldn't, we decided to surface. Once we found our boat we climbed aboard and found out that Fred had thought he was chasing us, and couldn't figure out why we were swimming away so fast! Ah, well, with so many divers in the water it was easy to get confused.

Back on shore we had a late dinner with Cari and Garret. We had lots of fun chatting with them. Afterwards we checked our email (after Rick reset the wireless base station again) to check the news on our new house in San Francisco. Then it was off to bed for a good night's sleep.