My nice 4-day vacation is finally coming to a close. I actually did some work tonight and submitted a bonus assignment, as well a prepared for lectures/small groups tomorrow. It was about time I did some work, as I spent all of the morning and a good portion of the afternoon scuba diving… (I swear I am not going for a while again! Well, at least 6 days… ) Today we traveled up the west coast of the island, which was thankfully much less choppy than the Atlantic side was yesterday. The planned Isle de Rhonde trip didn't happen, but we went to two new dive sites further up than the dive operator typically ventures. The new sites included:

• Car Pile: Basically an underwater junkyard of rusted out car frames, and a monument to the wasteful "throw-it-away" attitude of our society. The site was 130 ft plus deep… I think I only hit 127 ft before my dive computer started shrieking that I was exposing myself to too much oxygen, as the partial pressure of O2 in the Nitrox mix I was using had risen above 1.5… Ascending slightly cleared the alarm, and I continued my dive. We spent around 10 minutes on the car pile itself, (other than the novelty, and a small green moray eel peeking out of a trunk, there wasn't much to see), after which we proceeded up to a nice reef to finish out the dive. I was very relaxed and diving slowly this dive, and hung at the very back of the group… It ended up paying off, as I was the only one to see a nice stingray that was "flying" in slightly deeper waters behind us.
• The Cove: After a nice long 1 and 1/2 hr surface interval, we dove this new dive site which had just been named by the dive shop owner a few weeks earlier. Ok, while it was a few hundred yards out from a cove, there were no underwater coves, or caves, as I had hoped. Even so, it was a very nice dive, starting out with an 80 ft wall, and then proceeded to shallower and shallower depths. This worked out nicely for me, since by following the natural contour of the reef, I was able to keep my no-decompression time always hovering around 8-10 minutes. Saw lots of eels on the dive, as well as some banded coral shrimp, an assortment of rarer reef fish (Queen French Angel, Blenny and a pufferfish), and a nurse shark. At that point, I was slightly ahead of everyone else (since the DM had stopped to point out something that I had already seen), and the shark swam off before anyone else got a chance to see it.

All in all, a nice day diving, and completely without seasickness Now it's back to classes tomorrow But it's only a 4 day week