We woke up before 7 and made our way up to the salon for breakfast. Our dive site was called "Rocky Mountain High", and consisted of two large coral heads in about 50 feet of water. The visibility wasn't really high, but that was due to the amount of particulate matter in the water, which provides the food for the corals. Our first dive we swam around the two coral heads, looking in all of the nooks and crannies. We saw a huge lobster sitting on a ledge inside one, as well as a sand diver that was buried except for it's head.

After an hour and a half on the surface, we went back down with the camera (without the flash). We had decided to move slowly around one of the coral heads and look closely at all of the fish. It was fun to relax a bit and slowly move around; we noticed lots of small things that we would otherwise have gone right past. There were lots of different types of coral which made for some good close-up pictures.

Back on the boat we had another good lunch and then went up on deck to relax a bit. During lunch the boat moved to the wreck of the Hesperus. The ship was in a number of pieces scattered around the sea bottom, in about 20 feet of water. We were told that there would be a number of turtles there at night. Swimming around the site we found that it was fairly small. We saw a bunch of rays swimming around, some big ones and some babies.

We skipped the afternoon dive to work on our Nitrox certification with Donna, another one of the crew members. Nitrox is enriched air, usually containing between 32% and 36% oxygen (regular air has 21%). The idea is that you get less nitrogen absorbed into your blood, so you have longer bottom times. The one thing you have to watch out for is that you can actually get oxygen toxicity with Nitrox if you dive below 100 feet. Below that depth you stick with regular air. Our computers are Nitrox capable, so they take care of all of the work that you would manually have to do with a bunch of tables. Another passenger was taking the test with us and we all passed with no problems. We could start diving with it in the morning.

After dinner they divided the passengers up into two groups since the site was pretty small and would be to crowded if we all went in at once. We ended up going in around 9pm. On the bottom we saw some rays and some turtles. One of them snuck up on Rick, he was a bit startled to see a large turtle swimming out of the darkness at him! It was a lot of fun.

Back on the boat we could see a lightning storm moving in so we headed up onto the top deck with Ron, Karyn and John to watch the show. We were sitting looking towards the back of the boat and the storm extended across the sky from left to right. It was sliding across in front of us so we had a perfect view and weren't getting any rain. It was really spectacular to watch! Rick said he saw more lightning that night than he had seen in his prior nine years in the Bay Area. We had a great time talking and joking with everyone. At around 10:30 it was time for a good nights sleep.