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We were joined by two local divemasters, and Jackie, a young woman from Britain who had been travelling through Central America, and had recently completed her divemaster certification. (Oh yeah, we're an evenly matched bunch.) Fortunately, she was very laid back about the whole thing, and was more interested in having us all dive as a single group, rather than have the two divemasters split us up.

The terrain was different from Belize; while there, we saw tons of tropical fish (naturally, being in a marine park reserve), here we saw only a few fish, but beautiful coral and reef formations. The broad spectrum of shades made for a fascinating tour of the area, and our divemasters were both very good guides, pointing out some of the endemic species of fauna in the water. We did two dives, and once again, we could see how we were improving in our underwater skills. Erin, especially, is getting all kinds of great bad equipment/crisis training; during our certification last month, she had a leaky BCD; this time, her mask had a broken seal. But with more experience under our belt (and for a pretty good price, at least considering what it'll cost us when we get to French Polynesia), we were definitely feeling more confident about our diving.

After our dives, we enjoyed a nice, relaxing day. We returned to the hotel to shower, then walked back to a restaurant next to the dive shop for a big (and late) Creole-influenced lunch. Eager to get our sleeping schedules back on track, we treated ourselves to a lengthy nap, and basically didn't even need to bother with dinner, since we had lunch so late.

Moonrise

Instead, we returned to our hotel — excuse me, "botel" — and sat on the deck working on photos, and watching a group of what we think were high school kids on some sort of chaperoned trip, possibly a Christian youth group sort of thing. They were pleasant enough (i.e.: not overly noisy or rowdy), and somewhat entertaining. A giant full moon was rising over the horizon, casting the neighboring island as a silhouette, and apparently, the sight motivated them to surprise another woman — their chaperone, most likely — by mooning her. I'd say their plan to shock her worked: the poor girl couldn't stop shrieking for at least a minute. (Makes me wish we'd caught it on film!)

Tomorrow is a big travel day, and is so far the only time we have two independently scheduled flights in the same day: Bocas to Panama City in the morning, then Panama to Quito in late afternoon. No better time to get rested up than now, and Bocas sure did help in that regard: only two days here, but it felt like a week.

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