Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Palau 11/18

            Our day started out as the last several have, but the boat left a little later than usual as we had a couple of Chinese divers joining us and they were driving themselves to the shop.  Apparently the Chinese are routinely late and you have to tell them and earlier time if you want them to actually show up on time. 

            Once the two Chinese guys arrived we set off for the first dive site, Dexter’s wall.  Even though we had a few more divers today, it was just Fabio, Tua, Eric, and me underwater, which was very nice.  We had a nice slow dive where we could wander along and check everything out at our own pace. 

If you want to see turtles, go to Dexter’s wall.  Just as we dropped in there were three turtles within a 12 square foot area.  Then as we went along on the dive I quit counting them as there were so many.  I got some good footage of a turtle getting his shell cleaned by a couple fish at a cleaning station.  Then another turtle came gliding in to have his shell cleaned too.  It was rather funny watching them jockey for positions to see who would get cleaned next. 

Toward the end of the first dive we saw a huge aggregation of yellowfin fish which only occurs during the new moon.  There were so many fish it was like the whole wall was alive with fish.  It was quite something to see.  Eric said he could have spent the whole dive there photographing the masses of fish. 

For the second dive we decided to try Blue Corner again.  So far we have not managed to have much current there.  To really see a lot of sharks, a lot of large schools of fish, and a lot of action, you need a really good current.  So we thought maybe this time we would get some current, but mother nature just has not been cooperating so far.  Again, we had very slack current that actually changed about three times during the dive.  It was a nice dive, but not as exciting as it could have been with some current. 

After the second dive we went to German Channel and sat out our safety stop and had our lunch.  The Chinese and Japanese wanted to do a third dive there, so the rest of us waited on the boat while they did their third dive. 

We then headed back to the dive shop.  After arriving at the dive shop and rinsing off our cameras, we decided to have a drink at the Drop Off and check our emails.  Then we decided while we were there we might as well go ahead and order dinner while it was relatively quiet.  The Drop Off tends to get very loud and very busy later on the evening.  As we were waiting for our dinner, Mandy stopped by to tell us that Curtis Salgado (a famous blues musician) was on the island and was going to stop by and play for about 30 minutes before his flight out.    


So we hung around for a little while after our dinner to hear him play.  He did three songs (vocals and harmonica).  Boy could this guy play harmonica.  It was nice to hear something other than recorded music for a change.  After he got done playing we picked up all our stuff and headed across the street to our apartment to get cleaned up and ready to do it all over again tomorrow. 

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