Surviving the latin names of corals - and the hangover

Saturday 9^th was partially a “jolly” day with less science activities. We went for a jolly dive in the morning in on one of the dive sites nearby – and we actually found a warty frogfish! Very happy with that although my photos of the frogfish are absolutely rubbish. I really need to improve as  a photographer before buying an expensive camera – or maybe I’ll just buy the expensive camera and I might be able to take similar photos to what other people take with a piece of junk J

Warty Froggy

Moray

Chromodoris annae

After lunch we had another coral lecture to finish off the target species and went for a “pointy” dive in the house reef. I dived with our education officer Lea which was really nice since she has been with Coral Cay for a good while and is very good at the species identification. I could even “ask questions” on the other species (as much as you can “ask” underwater where you cannot speak).  We also found a feeding coral and a comet. (For those of you who do not dive: A comet is a fish that pretends to be a moray eel with a fake “eye” on their tail.

After diving and washing up the gear I went for a swim. I managed to do one hour of swimming in the open sea although I was dead scared of the titan triggers on the reef, haha! I thought they might chew some additional holes on me booties which would be less pleasant. I haven’t seen any jellyfish here yet but I still wore my short wetsuit to protect from the smaller stingers – a good idea because there were some in the water and one of the nasty buggers decided to sneak under my wetsuit. Well, they did not sting that hard so the Finnish princess survived her first open water swim in the Philippines J

I also made my way to the well to “shower” and since there was no audience of local men this time I even managed to wiggle out of my bikini under my towel and get changed. Little things are sometimes so difficult here – like trying to get a good bath and staying reasonably decent. Aseady noted, I’m sure the local girls don’t bathe in their bikinis therefore I shouldn’t really blame the local men too much for standing staring at us – but it still feels kind of odd trying to have a bath with an audience.

In the evening we had a party and got some Tanduay with coke and beer to bring to the beach and made a nice bonfire. I think I went to bed about 5am after dancing with Lucas, Lea and Lance on the porch for a good while, haha. I think the rest of our little survivors group only went to bed about 5.30am.

I woke up at 8.30am and could not sleep – as usual when I drink. I just completely lack the ability to sleep! We tried to figure out how the stove works but the gas kept turning itself off as soon as you let go of the switch, therefore I gave up on it and decided to have some toast with peanut butter instead as Neasa and Mike were kind enough to give me some of their peanut butter (They were probably the first people to get up this morning). I also managed to do some revision on the coral although I was rather braindead. I would really need to study some more but my brain cannot take any more latin names before its had a good rest. I seem to be on kitchen cleaning squad but considering Joe who is the staff member to explain to me and Gareth what needs to be done in terms of cleaning up the kitchen  is not around we won’t be doing it quite yet (he might do some cleaning too I hope!) I decided to sit down on my bed and write my diary/blog instead. I think it would be a good time for a nap now – it’s about 11am and I should really sleep some more.