Certified

Yes, Tom and I are certified- divers that is!

After 5 months, 4 visits to Roatan, 3 stormy non-divable days, 2 rounds of sandflea attacks, and 1 gross bout of seasickness (Tom on Saturday), we're finally both certified Open Water Scuba Divers.

One benefit of living in Honduras is the ability to take a quick overnight jaunt to the Bay Islands to do some diving. We left Saturday morning and did a dive with our favorite intstructor, Arturo, at Sueno Del Mar dive resort. This dive resort has been extremely flexible, friendly, and also has beautiful rooms.

Arturo took us underwater with 8 others, and while exploring the reef we saw a whole bunch of fish. It was as if we'd just gone to some Disney aquarium display and jumped in. We saw brightly colored reefs, corals, and of course a bunch of really cool fish. We saw angel fish that were the size of a steering wheel. It kind of put my 12 gallon hex aquarium (circa 2001-2004) and the 15 or so 1 inch angel fish I went through to shame. One highlight of this dive was an 8 minute encounter with a sea turtle. Below, Tom is showing the signal for a sea turtle. (Since yelling "Hey look at this sea turtle!" is pretty difficult to do while you have the breathing apparatus -called the 2nd stage- to your mouth.)


On Sunday morning, we went out for our final step toward certification. This dive was also awesome. I began to think about the fact that since we, as regular folks, can't explore space, exploring under the sea was pretty darn cool. About 20 minutes into the dive, I noticed one of the gentlemen in our group do this:


Tom and Arturo had swum ahead, but I noticed just in time to see. The nurse shark was hanging out underneath the reef, just checking stuff out. I wasn't even scared!

This is a picture of a nurse shark. I don't have one of those fancy diving cameras yet.

Now that school is over, we're just wrapping up some loose ends at school. We'll be headed back to the states for the summer on Monday.* We're so excited to spend June and July with the Notch family. The Karine and Tom in Honduras blog may appear to be Karine and Tom in Minnesota for the next two months. We are, however, looking forward to returning to La Ceiba for Year 2 in August.

*Note to any would-be-burglars: Our vigilant, well-connected, tough friends will be housesitting all summer, and our guard dog will still be working full time!