Day Four

08/02/2005
This morning I didn’t wake up until Doug came down the hall to rouse Josh and I. My contact was bothering me somewhat (right eye) but it settled down after my first dive. Today we rode out on the Moya with Mark and his nephew again. We dove Mary’s Place (note: since this journal, I read an article in the Scuba Today magazine about Mary’s Place, apparently it is quite the Big Deal) first off, making it, at 110 ft, the deepest place I have ever dived. Mary’s Place is a natural rift in the coral reef, about 4 ft wide and quite a large number of times deeper , it is one of the most spectacular on Roatan’s reefs. We dove the deep end first, Doug following Josh, who followed me. I followed Mark. He stopped twice to point out fan-worms, very pretty, delicate, feeders extended like silk flowers from a lipstick case. He tapped them gently with his pointer-stick-thingy and they zipped down to nothing, leaving only a tiny tube of black body left. We spotted another jelly off the edge of the wall. Josh had to give me another weight while I was down, but I did not break the surface this time. I have sunburn across my shoulders, but that is the only part of me that appears burnt, the only real difficulty is the huge amount of sand fleas that seem magnetically attracted to my body. I had to go through a fan of ocean plants (I assume) to enter Mary’s Place, but apart from one or two tank bumps on rocky outcroppings, I didn’t manage to touch anything. The boat ride back was lovely, the Moya is quite a bit smaller then the Voyager. It bounced with every tiny wave and seemed like immortality with an engine. I chatted with Mark on the way back, who has 5 brothers and 5 sisters, a few of whom live in Miami and other parts of the States. Josh is taking the Rescue Diving course here, so I opted to wait out the second dive of the day and nap on and off by the pool. I got to talking with one of the little dive masters in training about school and everything and she mistakenly thought that Josh and I were dating, but was quite embarrassed to discover that we’re simply friends and apologized profusely, but I didn’t mind, poor chickie. Cute girl J. during my brief cameos of conciousness, I saw Josh working on his skills and crabs scuttling away under my eye. There is a small attention-whore of a kitten that is taken care of by Gillian in the shop. It is white with red spots and yellow-green eyes and huge batty ears. We ate in the resturant above the shop, some sort of beef-like meat in a rather good sauce with mashed potatoes and a small salad. The second dive for me was nearly as fabulous as the first, I saw three moray eels, a huge crab and innumerable fishes. We docked at a Coco Beach boat, with a total of 12 divers from that boat alone, there was a huge seahorse found by the dive master from the Coco-people, at least double the size of the one we saw yesterday. I’m exhausted, but happy. I made a brief surface during our three minute safety stop, but I could fix it easily and did. A few trumpet fish later and Mark zipped away on his motory-bike a contraption seemingly held together by dive stickers and luck. We ate here at Palmetto tonight, and afterwards Josh and I lay on the dock under the canopy and watched the stars dance above us through the opening in the center. We talked about serious things, but later, looking down into the water I saw blinking lights and rushed back down the pier to grab handfuls of sand and cause mini-explosions of light.