Sunday, November 16, 2014

Palau 11/16

            We went out to The Taj for dinner last night with Fabio and two of our dive companions from Italy, Fabricio and Barbara.  It was a fun evening.  We all ordered something we wanted to try and then shared it with everyone.  We had potatoes, Yellow Dal (lentils), palak paneer, butter chicken, another kind of chicken, regular rice, saffron rice, garlic naan, and cheese naan.  The food there is very good and we all ate way too much. 

            After dinner we came back to the apartment and crashed into bed.  We have been waking up around 5:30 or so every morning and have the alarm set for 6:20 a.m. so we won’t oversleep.  We got up this morning and had our breakfast and got all our stuff together and walked over to the Drop Off to see if we could get the blog and the Facebook post updated before we left to go diving for the day.  I think Eric managed to get the blog posted, but the Facebook post just would not go, so he had to give up.

            We joined the others on the boat around 8:30 or so.  Today it was a fairly small group.  We had Fabricio, Barbara, Eric, me, Fabio and two new guys from Guam (stationed there with the Coast Guard) who were visting Palau for a few days.  We also had a Japanese lady, but she was diving with the Japanese guide. 

            Our first dive of the day was at Sandy Paradise.  This is one of the prettiest dives in Palau.  The coral here is large, colorful, abundant, and the visibility tends to be really good most of the time.  We saw the first turtle of the trip here and he was very, very cooperative.  Eric got an awesome picture of him with Barbara in the background.  There were of course sharks here and there and some large schools big-eye trevally, snapper, yellowfin barracuda, etc. 

            Our second dive was planned for Ulong wall/channel.  During our surface interval a pod of dolphins came by, so our boat driver started up the boat and we raced around to see if we could get them excited enough to jump and spin and ride the bow.  However, they did not seem to be too interested today—they must have had other things on their minds.  We got a few takers to ride the bow, but not many and not for very long.  We then headed back to our mooring line to finish our safety stop before getting in again.

            We started out doing Ulong wall and there was not much current, so we headed into the channel.  This is another very pretty dive here in Palau.  There are a lot of corals, sharks, several types of grouper, Titan triggerfish (which are mating and nesting now), and of course the famous wall of lettuce leaf coral and the two giant clams at the end of the channel.  As with most dive sites here in Palau you can dive the same site over and over and every time it will be different depending on the current, but no dives ever disappoint. 


            After this dive we headed to Ulong island for lunch.  We had our lunch in the shade of the lush trees on the island and then walked up and down the beach for a while before all getting back on the boat and winding our way through the rock islands on the way back to the dive shop.  Here in Palau this is one of the best parts of diving every day—winding your way in and out of the lush rock islands surrounding by the multiple shades of turquoise blue crystal clear water.  It is the perfect start and end to a wonderful day of diving.      

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