It has arrived! I received the call this morning; my luggage has landed. Continuing in the same vein of service quality I have been dealing with all along, I was told to pick it up at the held luggage office. The airport is an hour and a half away, and due to Coral Cay rules, I would have to take a staff member with me. Right. After a few verbal skirmishes with the agent, my bags were delivered to the compound just after lunch. It was like Christmas. Everyone crowded around just to smell my clean clothes, and 'ohhed' and 'ahhed' as I unpacked my toiletries and gear. I feel like a whole woman again.
In fact, the day went well overall. We quickly dispatched chores and announcements, then jumped into our lecture on invertebrates. These guys are much easier than the fish, and there are fewer of them. Feeling pretty good about the science, we went for a morning pointy, and I recognized about half the invertebrates I saw even without previous study time.
Coming back into shore, I had a mini-disaster. I was still using another volunteer's mask (my mask was in the process of being delivered), and somehow it disappeared. The process for ending a dive involves handing gear (weight belt, mask, snorkel, BCD and tank) to the people on board, then kicking furiously with your fins to lift yourself out of the water, throwing yourself over the gunwale and wiggling forward until you can swing a leg over the side and fall in (the boat, hopefully). In the meantime, whoever you handed your gear to has stowed it safely under a bench, and there it stays until you get back to shore. Somehow, the mask I was using didn't obey these rules, and when I went to retrieve it from under the bench, it was gone.
This puts me in a slightly awkward position as I don't have the ability to buy a new one at the moment. I made my apologies to the volunteer who had loaned it to me and we came up with a way for me to replace it once back in the States, but I still feel horrid. I like to take care of my own equipment, and that goes double for other people's things. Did I mention I lost his snorkel yesterday?
For lunch, some genius has figured out how to make crust, and we feasted on pizza (even cut up canned hot dogs are tasting great now). After lunch was more study, prepping for our invertebrate test tomorrow night. I can feel the fish already losing place in my memory...
The sun decided to grace us with a brilliant afternoon after we suffered a morning of rain, and we headed into our second dive feeling like nothing could go wrong. Which, of course, is exactly when it does. Halfway out to the dive site, the boat engine sputtered out. And died. Fortunately, our boat captain knows his way around an outboard and had it up and running before we could seriously contemplate swimming for shore. Another invertebrate pointy, another good dive. We saw several cool critters, one of my favorites being the flamingo tongue (see photo above). These colorful snails are very pretty underwater, and are apparently quite common in this part of the Caribbean.
I love finding new creatures to look at. New dive locations bring entirely new varieties of fish, coral and invertebrates, constantly reminding me how different the world's marine eco-systems are from each other.
We ended the day with a safety briefing on oxygen- how to store it, when to use it, and how to get that darned tank to flow. It's a good thing for everyone on site to know, and it was a great segue into the rest of my evening, which was reading my Emergency First Responder manual. As part of the expedition package, I'm renewing my certificate (my old one is slightly expired... by about four years).
At around 9:30 tonight, after everyone else had gone to bed, I was sitting outside finishing up my review questions. Absently scratching my legs, the itching became more intense. I had to put the book down to really get at the bites, and that's when I realized how chewed up I was- I counted over sixty spots, just from my knees down. No bugs can be this hungry. I'm beginning to wonder if I have small pox; I certainly look like it.

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