Scuba Steve and Friends

Thursday, August 3rd, Roatan, Honduras

Today was our second day of diving. We had another wonderful night's sleep (heavy sarcasm) thanks to a blackout around 3AM which shut down our fan and caused the ambient temperature in our room to reach a point where we could have baked bread, so we were very refreshed in the morning. Hit our usual bakery for breakfast before meeting Malia to brief our morning dive. We did our second confined water dive in about 7 feet of water just off the beach, mostly skills work. Highlights included Alexey accidentally pulling the regulator out of Greg's mouth, seeing a green eel and finishing the majority of the skills work so we could start diving for fun in the afternoon.

We ate lunch at the same bakery (that place was awesome, run by a German dude) and then reported back for the 2PM open water dive. This dive was a blast. It was about 10 minutes away by boat, we reached a depth of 55' and were in the water for about an hour. We did some skills work like hovering, establishing neutral buoyancy, etc. and then we were free to explore for a while. The coolest part was when we went through an arch in the coral, coming out at a dropoff where all you could see was deep blue, both in front of you and down, just sitting on the edge of the abyss. Floating motionless in the face of this void was a pretty surreal feeling. Only minor downer was Greg slashing his finger on coral going through the passageway when the three of us caused an underwater traffic jam by not allowing enough spacing between us.

After the dive we showered up and then visited this rotisserie chicken place that we had heard a lot about, and man, was it worth the hype. For a reasonable price you got a quarter-chicken and two sides. I had the potato salad and mamalot, I think it was called, kind of a cross between orzo pasta and couscous, just awesome. The boys got coconut-flavored beans and rice, which was also incredible.

AFter dinner we decided that we didn't feel like paying for all of our drinks at the bars and also that we wanted to try some of this Nicaraguan rum that we'd heard so much about. So we bought a bottle of Flor de Cana (missing accent; sorry julissa but i'm on a gringo keyboard), a bag of ice, some coke and a couple of decks of cards and went back to the hotel. We sat outside (our room was too brutally hot to stay in side), poured some drinks and played some poker; Alexey and Jose were nice enough to give Greg a primer in Texas Hold 'Em. Our two Danish friends, Hella and Milla, showed up shortly with another bottle of rum, the really good stuff, and joined us. We hung out drinking rum with them for a while and then crashed as we had two morning dives the next day and we were fully expecting another horrible night's sleep.