Day 726 - Turtle time

The divers got lucky this morning and scored a free dive out under an abandoned oil rig that is now home to gigantic schools of all sorts of fish who have no problems of coming to within a few centimetres of your mask, as if tyring to work out what place you have in their underwater world. The rest of the day was spent hanging out, waiting for the sun to break through the thick layer of cloud. But when the sunshine comes, you well and truly know that you're on a tropical island!When the temperature picked up, we headed out to a dive sight, aptly named paradise, and spent the next 2 hours snorkelling in the tropical waters searching for things to see - which isn't very hard. If you know what to look for with just a snorkel you can see lion fish, moray eels, crocodile fish, trumpet fish (and the rarer golden trumpet fish), needle fish, trigger fish, and spectacularly colourful angel and butterfly fish.

And for those who can hold their breath there was even one big hawksbill turtle - you had to earn the privilege of seeing him though, as he was feeding at about 10m deep. As if all this colourful marine life wasn't enough, as we did this the sun was setting in all its magnificent glory, colouring the water's surface as if competing with the colourful fish below.

Even the kids who have this watery wonderland to play in daily, still have something to entertain them!

The evening was spent continuing our day of aquatic observation, and when you live directly above the water we can just gaze at the water with a dive light - much better than any tv show! Imagine finishing dinner then watching an octopus crawling towards its home, while strangely shaped scorpion fish flutter amongst puffer fish! We even got to see another turtle floating in the waist-deep waters below us.

Adlibing a hawksbill.