Complete and Utter Randomness: September 2009

Larry and I had such a wonderful time together! Thanks so much to Larry's uncle Jim for letting us use his absolutely beautiful Condo.
The Sunday morning after I arrived we woke up very early to go to the charter boat and on our dives. It was an absolute blast! Our first dive was on a boat called the Red Sea, I can't even explain what it feels like to jump off the boat into the water. That rush of sea water filling your line of vision. You feel disoriented at first and start kicking toward the surface so you can find your way back to the line. After giving everyone a goofy grin I let the air out of my BCD so I could swim down and toward the line. Grabbing hold of the line and swimming down, I started looking for Larry. Once I knew he was behind me we started swimming towards the bow of the boat. It was incredible. Imagine swimming down 20 feet, 30 feet, 40, 50, 60 feet and stepping onto a sunken ship. All the while shimmering bait fish are creating waves all around you. It was absolutely breath taking. Our dive master showed us a lovely octopus snuggled into a port hole. He graced us by sending some tentacles out to see if we were tasty.
The second ship we dove was a Naval ship called The Strength. The bow has actually separated from the Stern. There was a slight current in the water, but we saw a lot more fish, some Jelly's and sea cucumbers.
For the rest of the week we did some snorkeling and then eventually the next Saturday we made it out to dive again. This time it would be just Larry and I.....

For the record, it doesn't matter how much you know the person above water. Below water is a completely different story. I think I can honestly say Larry and I both experienced some frustrating moments underwater where we wanted to say something but couldn't. But it was magical all over again. To my absolute delight as soon as we dropped down into the jetty I found a huge beautiful sand dollar.
For those of you who don't know I adore sand dollars and have always wanted to find one on the beach. I made some high pitched girly noise through my regulator. Larry actually found another for me, and we continued to drift along in the current. Or at least that was our intent. But see the current had other plans. It decided it was bigger and better than us, and carried us way off course. When Larry and I decided to surface because we couldn't see much we stopped at our safety stop of 20 feet for three minutes. Apparently Larry was wearing some sort of fish cologne because as we were waiting this fish...who looked somewhat like a baby shark. With the dive flag holder in one hand Larry desperately tried to get the fishark to leave us alone, he would not relent. He would swim away, then come back, swim away and come straight back. I decided to surface as I thought we seemed off course. Sure enough when I popped out of the water we were VERY far away from shore. Desperately trying to tug on Larry's dive flag line, I was finally able to get him to surface. We realized we were far from shore so we started swimming towards it.
The dive boat that we had been on last Sunday ended up driving by us and asked if we were okay. We made our signals to let them know we were okay, but they asked us to come aboard because we were sort of in the middle of a boating highway.

After we arrived back on shore and took a quick break we were back in the water looking for a rum runner that had just been discovered off of St. Andrews bay only a few months ago.
Isn't that amazing? Who knows how long it has been there, it's only 25 feet off shore, and no one knew about it until it started to surface a few months ago. There were fish everywhere feeding off of algae and playing. We saw some sting rays, and Larry indulged me in finding baby Sand dollars.

We had a wonderful vacation together. I hope you enjoy our pictures!

Our mystery fish. It was a Remora Suckerfish!