Today was
another casual day. We got up at our
usual time and had our breakfast and made our way across the street to wait for
the other divers to arrive. Today we
left the dock a little earlier as we had to pick up the Chinese guys at their
hotel’s dock. Today we had the four
Chinese guys, two Koreans, Tua, Eric, me, and another couple from Hawaii (Jeff
and Terri).
Our first
dive of the day was at Blue Holes. It
was a very easy dive. As we had done
this dive before we just poked around and Eric did some silhouette shots before
we made our way out and down the wall toward Blue Corner. There really was not much current today, so
it was a somewhat easy dive.
Most of the
rest of the people on the boat wanted to do three dives, so Eric and Tua and I
decided to sit out the second dive which was at Dexter’s wall and instead do
the third dive which was planned for German Channel. This meant we had a 3+ hour down-time on the
boat that included our surface interval after the first dive, the dive time for
the second dive, and the surface interval/lunch after the second dive. However, this time went by fairly quickly as
Eric and I talked with Tua.
We actually
went to the very shallow sandy area just to the other side of German Channel
for lunch. It was low tide and so the
water was only a couple feet deep. It
was not quite a beach, but almost.
Luckily we only had a little bit of a shower on the way to our lunch
spot today and that was it for rain.
We waited
until about 2:00 p.m. to get in for the dive at German Channel. We were trying to wait as late as possible so
that the current would pick up and the mantas would be feeding. When we got in there was very little current
so we headed toward the cleaning station.
There was not anything going on, so we headed out into the blue to see
if we could see anything. Not too long
after that we saw a manta heading straight for us. It glided by us headed for the cleaning station. So we all turned around and headed back to
the cleaning station.
I got some
good video of the manta slowly gliding and circling over the cleaning
station. She glided around for quite a
few passes and then off into the blue she went.
So we all swam out into the blue to see if we could find more
mantas. As we were swimming out we
spotted at least three. They were not
feeding yet as the current still had not picked up, but they were gliding back
and forth.
It turned
out to be a good dive. Everyone was
happy they got to see some mantas. After
the dive we started the journey back to the dive shop. I think we ended up getting back around 4:15
p.m. So as soon as we got back we headed
across the street to our apartment to get cleaned up and come back over to the
Drop Off before it got really busy.
Today they were having their 2nd annual Wahoo Classic fishing
tournament and activities all day long.
We got back
to the dive shop/Drop Off just before 5 p.m. and Fabrizio and Barbara were
there picking up their dive gear. So
they joined us and Tua at the Drop Off for one last drink together before they
left early tomorrow morning to head back to Italy. After their car arrived to take them back to
their hotel for the evening, Tua joined us for dinner and we watched the
Palauan dancers perform for the evening’s festivities.
Tua won’t
be joining us for diving tomorrow as it will be her no-dive day before she
flies on to her next destination, Manila.
She has approximately two more months before she completes her year off
traveling all over to many interesting dive destinations. After Manila she is heading on to
Sipidan/Malaysia. She has been to many
of the dive destinations we still have on our list to go to, so we enjoyed
talking with her about the various places she has been.
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