His dad sent us an e-mail and told us about how exiting he was and that he showed all his pictures and videos to his classmates the first day he was back at school. Thanks for sharing Marcel !

The highlight earlier this week was the find of “OctoPatty”  I thought Patrick’s octopus at Eden Beach was pretty cool but OctoPatty topped it.  Patrick’s octopus was large and out moving around, changing shapes and colors but Patty found cutest little octopus in front of our condo.  The body of this this guy was about 2″ (6cm) long and he kept raising up trying to convince us he was a big bad octopus.  I have know idea how Patty spotted him but it was way cool.

I would give you another tease from this morning’s dive but I can’t wait.  We dove with dolphins.  Mirjam spotted them as we were going into the water and we were fortunate enough to get out to them before they passed by.  Not sure how many there were, there were several waves, but I didn’t realize there were 5 in this picture until we got home and put them on the computer.

Thanks for the pictures Robert & Ilse.

Thursday afternoon, me and my group of eight are ready to make a fabulous east side dive!
We hop on board and i start the briefing. I tell the guests what they can expect, and how we’re going to do the dive. I also show them the signs of the different kind of fish and creatures we might see. Quite often when i do briefings i show them as kind of a joke the sign for shark, today i forgot about that (stupid me).

We all enter the water by doing a backroll. When everybody found their buddy we’re decending into the white hole.
As soon as we’re swimming along the beautifull wall we are greeted by tons of big tarpon that are just hanging out there, spending their afternoon. Everybody is enjoying the wonderfull surrounding we’re in. The corals on the wall in the white hole are magnificent. Suddenly everybody is looking on top of the wall. A wonderfull eagle ray elegantly flies by. Once we reached the end of the hole everybody is lining up. We’re going over to the shallow area to find our way to the drop off.

After a short swim we reach the drop off. I’m still counting if everybody is still folowing when i see somebody waving to get my attention. There it is… the sign for shark! The fist ting i’m thinking is: yeah sure!! Funny guy haha! But then i see he is pretty serious about it. I’m going over and my heart is skipping a couple of beats. There it is, laying under a little ledge. A nurse shark!
I do a little ‘happy dance’ and then show everybody this beauty. When everybody had the chance to have a good look at the shark we’re moving on!

Now the thing is, after something so spectacular it’s hard to keep the vibe going on. But this time the sea was i a good mood too! Turtles turtles everywhere. At a certain point you just could not count the amount in your vision. It had to be more than 20! Mostly big green ones! When i turned around too ask everybody how much air they had left, everybody was smiling in their regulators! Then finaly, just before we’re starting our ascent a small southern stingray passes by! That’s what you call the cherry on a pie!

We made our ascents and once we’re back on the boat, everybody is a little speechless. This dive was fenomenal! And once the first impressions sunk in everybody is exitedly talking about the wonderfull life mother earth just showed us!

 Pictures will follow !

We do night diving every week on Mondays and Wednesdays and this week on the 19^th @ 7 am we finally saw some action! The corals broadcasted spawn (gametes) by releasing eggs and sperm into the water to spread offspring. The fertilization of the eggs can take place inside the coral or outside in the open water. It was the Smooth Flower Coral that showed some action! Very smooth indeed. But may be that type of coral is just like humans, they did not followed the schedule from Stinapa at all, they probably did it when they feel like it, spontaneously works the best. Humans can make schedules too, usually that does not work either. So you can check the schedule and be lucky or just do a lot of night diving the next couple of weeks. I still have to figure out a proper hand signal…a decent one.