Close Encounter

Another really nice day again today.  I went out this morning and did the 9 and 11 oclock dives.  The first one was a drift dive, where you get down to your depth and just let the current take you along the wall.  I was taking a picture of a lionfish on the wall and just turned back around to see a sea turtle about three feet away from me on a collision course.  I'm not sure what the turtle was planning if I hadn't looked up, but we came pretty close.  I got ribbed about that one from the other divers because most of them were watching the turtle.  Pictures of both the turtle and a lionfish are attached.  Probably saw about ten lionfish on that dive.  They are an invasive species that are not naturally found in the Caribbean.  It is thought that some got released from home aquariums at some time, and that they have now gotten prolific in the entire Caribbean.  They have venomous spines and do not have any natural predators here.  All the dive masters carry spears and are trying to control the population but it is still growing fast.  I saw one last year on 16 dives.  This year you see them all the time.  They are trying to get people to start eating them, as they're supposed to be pretty good, one you deal with the spines.  The second dive wasn't as nice as the first one, although two of the guys split off and went lionfish hunting.  They came back in with eight of them, one that was 13 1/2" long which might be a record size for Roatan.
Glen and Mandy took a water taxi down to West Bay for part of the afternoon and enjoyed that.  All of us piled into a water taxi tonight and went back there to Bite on the Beach for dinner.  I guess they are still the Monkey Lala champions as all the testers agreed that these ones were the best.  The water taxi driver stategically returned us to the floating bar on the way home.  Glen thought that place was quite the set up.
Early to bed tonight.  Taxi is coming for us at 8 in the morning to take us to our Catamaran.  They emailed today and said that the forecast is good and the captain says we should be able to head to Pigeon Cays, which is a small group of uninhabitated islands at the other end of Roatan.  If the weather isn't perfect, we'll divert to some more sheltered destination.  The snorkelling is supposed to be terrific.

Lionfish

Close call with a turtle